What Is A Belief Legend?

Author(s): Linda Dgh

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Folklore, Vol. 107 (1996), pp. 33-46
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Folklore 107
(1996):33-46
RESEARCH PAPER
What Is A Belief
Legend?
Linda
Degh
Abstract
As contributor to the
mistakenly conceptualised concept
of "belief
legend,"
I want to
survey
the
historical antecedents and the circumstances that at a certain
stage prompted
researchers to
identify
this
category, formerly
classified as
mythical
or
demonological legend.
This was the
time when
legend
scholars
began
field-collection,
experiencing
the
profound
attachment of
narratives to
living
local folk
religion.
After decades of meticulous field observation, which has
led to the accumulation of a more
dependable
stock of
legendry
from diverse national, subcul-
tural,
occupational groups,
it becomes clear that folk belief is a
part
of
any legend,
therefore
there is no need to maintain the term "belief
legend."
Belief is the stimulator and the
purpose
of
telling any
narrative within the
larger category
of the
legend genre;
it is also the
instigator
of the
legend
dialectic. The current confusion caused
by
the whimsical
application
of terms such as
"truth,"
"rationality,"
"belief,"
and
"believability"
in
scholarly legend interpretations,
should
caution us to avoid
making
biased,
outsider's
judgements
instead of
presenting
the
viewpoint
of
tellers and audiences.
Preamble
In the
experience
of
folklorists,
tellers
state,
explain,
interpret
or at least
imply
their
personal
attitude to-
ward the belief content of the
legend they
tell. Atti-
tude
toward belief is the essence of the
genre
and can
be
expressed
in diverse
ways; whereby
identical con-
tents-variants of the same
legend type, may
likewise
be
developed differently, depending
on diverse inter-
pretations
of similar extranormal
experiences
of indi-
vidual tellers. This
peculiarly pivotal position
of be-
lief in
legend
makes all
legends
belief
legends.
I made this statement in the revised edition of
Folktales and
Society (1989) following my
return to the
village
of Kakasd
eighteen years
after the first edition
of
my
book
appeared.
There I was able to take stock of
current
legendry composed
of a handful of mass-me-
dia-inspired
UFO and revenant
stories,
the old and un-
changed
stories I
knew,
and their
rejuvenated
versions,
adapted
to a
technologically
advanced environment:
village
streets were now
paved, electricity
had been
introduced,
and
people
drove cars and
motorbikes,
and
owned
bathrooms, televisions,
radios and
tape
record-
ers. From
my
first visit almost
forty years
earlier,
I could
follow
transgenerational continuity
in
legendry. Being
interested
primarily
in the art of
storytelling
and the
folktale
repertoire
of the
villagers,
I knew little before
this last visit about the intricacies of a network of folk
religion
based on
deeply
devout Catholicism. I discov-
ered
only
then,
and understood
retrospectively,
tradi-
tional
community
belief in black and white
magic,
en-
acted
by
the custom of ritual
cursing
and
countercursing
as a formal Roman Catholic Church
ceremony,
and attested case
by
case in
whispered-
around
legends.
The belief that disease and death oc-
curs as the
consequence
of a sinful curse and divine
punishment answering prayer
still
permeates
the reli-
gious
belief of the
villagers (Digh
1995, 341-57).
I should have realised that "belief" is an unneces-
sary epithet preceding
the term
"legend"
when I
pro-
posed
a
systematic study
of the role
indigenous
belief
plays
in
legend
formation
(Degh
1963, 73)
and contin-
ued to use the term "belief
legend"
after
my discovery
of
predominantly supernatural
narratives on the
American urban-industrial scene.
In
my
often
quoted
conference
paper,
"The 'Belief
Legend'
in Modern
Society:
Form, Function,
and Re-
lationship
to Other Genres"
(Degh
1971, 55-68), I
re-
ported
for the first time the
amazing
stories of ordi-
nary people
about encounters with revenants and the
tragic
outcome of extranormal horrors in the collec-
tion of
my
students at Indiana
University.
In another
paper,
"Neue
Sagenerscheinungen
in der industriellen
Umwelt der USA"
(Digh
1973, 34-51).
which I
gave
at
a
legend
conference in
Freiburg, Germany,
I further
elaborated the
concept
and the nature of
supernatural
belief oriented
legendry, expressing my
excitement
over an
unexpected
wealth of stories that
played
an
important
role in the life of
youngAmericans,
unknown
to me and others
experiencing legends
in
Europe.
At
that
time,
continental
European
folklorists were insen-
sitive to
legends
other than what old
villagers
re-
counted; most of them still are.
Characteristically, my
search for variants of the "Sto-
len Grandmother"
legend,
which I first read in a Bu-
dapest newspaper
in 1962 and heard often thereafter
in
personalised versions,
resulted
mostly
in succinct
abstracts because the fellow folklorists who sent them
to me did not
recognise
as folklore the stories
they
heard from their urban-elite friends. It is true that sev-
34 Linda
Digh
eral scholars took the trouble to
glean ghost
or horror
stories from local
newspapers
and other
popular prints
and
manuscripts,'
to increase the number of variants
of field-collected "authentic" oral texts
they analysed
comparatively,
but
they
did not feel them
worthy
of
attention
concerning
context and textual
accuracy. My
continued fieldwork in rural and urban
Europe,
Canada and the United
States, however,
gave
me new
insights
into the
legend
as
text,
philosophy
and be-
haviour;
as
personal,
communal and mass
perform-
ance;
and as indicator of the transformation of the so-
cial world in the aftermath of the Second World War.
My experience
in
collecting
from
representatives
of
diverse cultural
groups,
not theoretical
presumptions,
convinced me that no distinction of a
separate category
of
legends
as "belief
legends" (belief tales,
urban be-
lief
tales) proposed by
folklorists is
justifiable
because
belief is inherent in all
legends.
In
fact,
legend
contextualises and
interprets
belief.
In what
follows,
I will
clarify my position by
sur-
veying
the
history
of the "belief
legend" concept
and
its uses in the
writings
of
folklorists,
showing
how use-
ful the term was in
genre
identification and classifica-
tion
attempts
but how it has outlived its usefulness in
our
time. I will discuss belief not as a folklore
genre
as
some folklorists have claimed
(Gwyndaf
1994, 228),
but as the
ideological
foundation or core of the
leg-
end. I will
suggest
that
juxtaposition
of belief and
knowledge-that
is,
religion
and science-can be en-
lightening
because in their dialectic
ambiguity,
as
par-
allel
opposites,
both
play important
roles in the
leg-
end
process. Finally,
I will show the
futility
of the cur-
rent
legend name-giving
inflation and
propose
to
study
the
legend
as one unified
genre according
to one uni-
fied
scholarly inquiry
instead of the continued addi-
tion of more
subcategories.
During
the
past years,
the
question
of the relation-
ship
between belief and
legend
has been raised
by
many.
Whichever related
topic
interests folklorists-
religion,
belief,
superstition,
custom or
ritual-they
inevitably
end
up using legends they
have collected in
support
of their
arguments.
But there is little collabo-
ration between folklorists to build
upon
each other's
findings. Groups
of scholars work on different
planes
side
by
side, without
acknowledging
each other's con-
tributions. For
example,
a
group
of four authors ex-
perimenting
with the reflexive
approach
to belief dis-
cuss
religion
rather
abstractedly,
and not
being
able to
bring
new
insight
into the discussion, end
up
with the
modest
proposal
to
replace
established terms with new
ones (see Western Folklore 54
[1995]).
Another
largely
unnoticed contribution, Robin
Gwyndaf's
native eth-
nography provides
an
exemplary model, document-
ing continuity
and the
processes
of modernisation of
traditional folk belief in Wales, from field collected
customs and
legends (Gwyndaf 1994, 226-60). On the
other hand, Leea Virtanen
reported, surprisingly,
the
total demise of belief
legends
in Finland because
peo-
ple's mentality
has
changed
under the influence of
modern urbanisation.
According
to contributors to the
Finnish Folklore Archive, electric
lights
have
dispelled
the fear of
ghosts lurking
in
strange places
after dark
(Virtanen 1992, 225-31).
An
entirely
different situation:
ghost
stories
living
in
everyday
conversation, led to
Gillian Bennett's
plea
to resuscitate the terms "belief
legend/belief story" (Bennett 1989).
The
problem
with
these,
and other current discussions of belief and
leg-
end, is that while authors raise
important questions,
they keep restating
and
rephrasing
what we
already
know,
and remain
entangled
in the web of termino-
logical rhetoric-arguing
the salience of
name-assign-
ment to
legend subcategories
without a
logical attempt
at definition. Isn't it time to
join
forces and
try
to de-
fine the
legend
at
long
last? Isn't it time to
stop specu-
lating
on the
many personal meanings
of a
qualifier
(like "contemporary")
and start
identifying
the ele-
ments that make a
legend
a
legend,
the elements
present
in all
legends
and absent from all other folk-
lore
genres?
The master
concept "legend"
has fallen
victim to
diligent subcategory
creators,
and the con-
troversy
over the
meaning
of the
working
title of a
subcategory
is
being given
undue
significance.
I am not
going
to add to the
interesting,
but sterile
and
redundant,
speculations
on the term
"contempo-
rary legend" triggered by
Heda
Jason's
warning against
interpretation
before collection and classification
(Jason
1990, 221-3)
because I have
already
stated
my
case
(Degh
1991, 17-18),
and do not feel
persuaded
to
change my
mind. In
my understanding,
"modern,"
"urban,"
or
"contemporary" legend-as
it was named
by
the Sheffield seminarians-are all
good
insiders'
working
titles,
useful for
identifying
certain
legends
and
legend-like
accounts collected from a
variety
of
communicative sources as
they emerge
and
gain
cur-
rency
and
temporary
relevance to social
groups
within
the time frames of our collaborative efforts.
Evidently,
to characterise a time-honoured
genre
as
"contempo-
rary"
is too
vague, general, subjective
and
narrow;
such
characterisation will outlive its
contemporariness
within a
generation,
if not sooner. The
interpretation
of the term is
speculative, abstractedly
theoretical,
dif-
fering
from one
person
to the
next,
while
they repeat
well known characteristics attributed to the
legend
proper by generations
of scholars in diverse constella-
tions. This is true of the last three definitions in a re-
cent issue of Folklore:
(1) a
"contemporary legend"
nar-
rates events which
purportedly
occurred within a tem-
poral
horizon felt as
contemporary by participants
in
the narrative event"
(Pettit 1995, 97); (2) "normal be-
haviour
pattern
and unusual action"...
"Contemporary
legends
sit somewhere between mundane, everyday
experiences
and the
extraordinary,
but with an unu-
sual twist
(Smith 1995, 99); and
(3) "the teller has
claimed that the
alleged
event is
contemporary
with
himself or herself: that it has
happened
within a few
weeks or months of the date of
telling" (Simpson 1995,
What Is A
Belief Legend?
35
100).
Do these authors
suggest
that the same
story may
be called
"contemporary" legend
if the teller claims
that he or his father or
neighbour
witnessed the
event,
but should be called "historical" or some other
name,
if it refers to
long ago
or to no date? Is
"contemporary
legend"
characterised
by
narrator's time
setting
in it-
self? And if
so,
what is the
scholarly
benefit of
creating
such a volatile
category?
The more
suggestions
are
made to
keep
the
simplistic
term
"contemporary"
alive,
the less
convincing
it becomes. There are more stable
and crucial indentification markers to
acknowledge.
To return to
Jason's critique,
I
support
the "unu-
sual"
Anglo-American approach
to
legend
outside tra-
ditional
peasant
communities. The democratic toler-
ance in
gathering,
the bold and unconventional inclu-
sion of
"any legend
that is
circulating actively"
(Brunvand 1991, 107)
had never been
practised
in Eu-
rope
before;
and in
spite
of its obvious
drawbacks, was,
and
is,
the
only
reasonable
approach
to
living legendry.
Legend-in-the-making
can be isolated
only
from the
assemblage
of all
pertinent
data
bearing
some sem-
blance to
legend
or
indicating
the
potential
of becom-
ing legend-information
that earlier was deemed
inauthentic, alien, fake,
corrupted
or rewritten. This
inclusive
approach
is in clear
opposition
to the selec-
tion of
exclusively
oral,
"authentic"
texts,
a rule of the
past. Dealing
with a
functional,
multimedia
processed
and
global
form of
folklore,
we can no
longer merely
apply principles grafted
for the
study
of
relatively
sta-
ble,
selfcontained
agricultural
communities.
The observation of the
emerging novelty
cannot wait
until
analytical categories
and classifications are set.
Like other traditionalist readers of
Foaftale
News,
Leander Petzoldt has also misunderstood the reason
for the unselective notation of non-oral
legends by
Anglo-American
authors.
Singling
out Brunvand as the
"most
eager multiplicator"
of stories
(Petzoldt 1989,
125),
Petzoldt has criticised the use of materials from
the mass media and Brunvand's
monitoring
of corre-
spondents
in
creating
a
legend circulating process by
professional
and amateur folklorists
(ibid., 26-7).
Since
the time of the Grimm
brothers,
it has been common
knowledge
that,
nolens
volens,
folklorists stimulate and
influence the folklore
they study;
how can
contempo-
rary legend
scholars be blamed for the modern mass
media's increased demand for sensational, appealing,
titillating
stories?
Every
shred of
proto-legend
is im-
portant
in this
polyphonic,
multimedia circulation.
Credit is due
Anglo-American legend
scholars for dis-
covering legends
on their own
turf-legends produced
and sustained
by
and for all social classes and
groups,
and for
shifting
the focus from the
past
to the
present
socio-economic and
political
realities behind the texts.
Beyond
the
way legends
have been collected, a differ-
ence in
topics, contents, informants and audiences has
been manifested, not so much because of some racial-
ethnic
Anglo-American predilection
toward
supernatu-
ral and horror stories, but because the
technological
transformation of
society
and its effects on human life
have been
symptomatically
reflected most
prominently
in
legendry,
and in America earlier than elsewhere in
the western world. This is
why, following
the Second
World War, similar
legends began
to
crop up,
first in
the most industrialised countries of western
Europe,
then in others as modern industrialisation
progressed.
When continental
European
scholars
joined
the
Anglo-
American team and
began
to
report,
and later
pub-
lish,
their
newly
discovered local
legends,
a
striking
similarity
was noted. Mass media
imported,
borrowed,
relocated and
popularised
known American
legends,
but
beyond
this, the transcontinental dissemination of
fears, uncertainties and
supernatural
beliefs endemic
to the alienation of modern urbanites established new
local
crops
of identical narratives. In other
words, the
globalisation
of concerns
produces
cultural variables
in a
strikingly
similar new
body
of international
leg-
ends discovered and
interpreted by
the contextual
approach
first in the United States. There is a definite
continuity
here, as the
growing
number of international
researchers
join
the collaborative
body
of the Interna-
tional
Society
for
Contemporary Legend
Research and
publish
their
homegrown
versions.
Belief
"Belief
legend"
as a term has a
long history.
It hails
back to the first folklore
empiricist's
observation of
informal conversations of
European villagers
on the
occasion of
legend telling. Looking
for
prose
narratives
other
than the
intensively
studied
magic
tale,
scholars
soon realised that the
legend,
more than
any
other folk-
lore
genre,
is
ideology
sensitive,
rooted in the local
system
of folk belief.
Therefore,
the
visiting investiga-
tor-often native
ethnographers-could
best
observe,
identify
and describe
legends
at casual
community
gatherings
where beliefs were sure to be a
topic
of con-
versation. It was also found that
legend
does not have
its own reserved occasion for
performance
as do artis-
tic entertainments such as tale- or
joke-telling,
ballad-
singing, dancing
and
mumming;
there are no
planned
"legend
sessions,"
only unpredictable, spontaneous
tellings.
Thus,
direct
questioning
of chosen individu-
als to solicit
legends
leads nowhere. Friedrich Ranke
was a
pioneer
in
speaking
about the
"Biologie
der
Volkssagen"
in 1926. He felt the need to relate
living
legendry
to the
ruling
belief
system,
the
locally forged
ideology
of folk
religion,
to understand its
place
in eve-
ryday village
life. But he was convinced that the tell-
er's
positive
belief in the truth of the
legend,
not the
desire to submit his
viewpoint
to
public
discussion as
we have found, was the essence of the
genre.
It is common
knowledge
that the human
being is,
by nature, a homo
religiosus,
who
by compulsion
con-
structs
personal variables of the established Church
canon in which he or she has been indoctrinated
by
public
education. It is also common
knowledge
that
36 Linda
Digh
religion
is
socially
constructed as
people
interact with
family
members, friends,
and
acquaintances: "they
learn to see the world from the
vantage point
of those
particular
interactions,"
as social
psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihilyi
has observed
(Csikszentmihilyi
1993,
59). Following
Ranke,
collectors of
village
narrative
rep-
ertoires--Otto Brinkmann,
Gottfried
Henssen,
Matthias
Zender
(Brinkmann 1933;
Zender
1935;
Henssen
1955)
and others in the 1930s and
40s--explored
manifesta-
tions of
underlying
belief
commonly condescendingly
conceptualised by
most academic folklorists as
"super-
stition." In
fact,
the
discovery
and scientific
analysis
of
belief-related narratives
by
Ranke's followers contra-
dicted the overall
practice
of
abstracting formally
simi-
lar items of
"superstition"
from field collections of
leg-
ends,
and to order and
classify
them for
local,
regional,
national and international indexes and
encyclopaedias,
irrespective
of their diverse cultural
meanings
and func-
tions. Such sourcebooks and indexes are too numerous
to
list;
it will suffice to mention the oft
quoted giant,
the ten-volume Handw&rterbuch des deutschen Aber-
glaubens (1927-42), by
the
Swiss,
Hanns Bdichtold-
Stdiubli.
In the United
States,
the collection of
superstitions
was second
only
to that of
ballads;
these were the two
areas most
popular
with
pioneer
folklorists. The col-
lection of
"Popular
Beliefs and
Superstitions"
in Frank
C. Brown's North Carolina Folklore
(Vols
6 and
7,
1961
and
1964)
was a model for the first
generation
of Ameri-
can academic folklorists. Local archives stored such
collections. In the
spirit
of the German
philological
school,
Wayland
Hand
spent
a lifetime
excerpting, clip-
ping
and
mounting
belief items on 3 x 5
cards,
creating
categories
for an
encyclopaedia
of "American
popular
beliefs and
superstitions,"
without theoretical clarifi-
cation to
justify
distinction between belief and
super-
stition. These terms are still used as
synonyms
in folk-
lorists'
parlance.
Generations of students learned the
skill of
reducing
elaborate
legends
to their skeletal es-
sence,
giving only
the
experienced
fieldworker an idea
of what
precious
materials had been lost. But if a
study
of "belief" was the
purpose
of
collecting,
not
only
was
belief detached from its social world
by
the deliberate
destruction of the text told
by
individuals,
but the re-
moval of the indicators of its cultural,
temporal and
social context resulted in
unspecific, indistinct, human
universals, useful at best for the
grist-mill
of the
psy-
choanalyst
in search of
general
functions of the mind.
Evidently, "belief" cannot be collected, only conjec-
tured
by
the
culturally
alien scholar. Belief is invisible,
inaudible, part
of local cultural
heritage
hidden behind
acts and narratives. It lives in the minds, not on the
lips
of
people;
it is a convention, inherited and
tacitly
shared
by
a
community's membership, composed
of individu-
als who
participate
in
shaping
and
internalising
the
belief.
Everyone
in
village
X knows that one should not
pick up
a
rag
or a horseshoe or a matchbox if it lies on
a crossroads, because it
may
have been
placed
there to
confer a curse; that
frogs
should be avoided as
poten-
tial witch familiars and that the handler
may get
warts
by touching
them. This common
understanding
need
not be stated. It is in latent
memory storage
until an
actual event calls it back to life; when harm is done,
countermeasures must be taken. A hex
sign
attracts
only
the
stranger's
attention, not the native's. When folklor-
ist Carla Bianco showed me the Rome market where
her mother used to
buy
foodstuffs, she
pointed
out the
horn
suspended
from the
top
of the booths. "Tell us,
what is this for?" she asked a vendor who was
busy
slicing prosciutto
with a
sharp
knife. "Don't
you
know?"
the woman
glared
at her with
deep disgust-she
had
known two
generations
of Carla's
family.
The native
folklorist had to
explain
that she had asked
only
for
my enlightenment
because it would be more convinc-
ing
if I heard it from "the folk." This is how I received
an authentic instruction about the
jettatura (evil eye).
For the uninformed
folklorist, the
only way
to dis-
cern
underlying
belief is to
participate
in
community
life and to look for manifest forms in
daily
activities.
This
way
it is
easy
to
identify
belief behind the elabo-
rate
performance
of
magic
and the
pertaining
narra-
tive account that
may
be verbalised in the form of
leg-
end or
magic
tale.
Speaking
of belief as
traditionally developed
ideol-
ogy,
reference can be made to
Csikszentmihalyi's
un-
derstanding
of the
evolutionary history
of humans'
extrasomatic
storage
of information contained in the
folklore of our ancestors:
Legends [he writes] encapsulated
centuries of useful
experience
in a few
rhymed
lines,
proverbs,
or caution-
ary
tales. The
young
members of the tribe no
longer
had to learn
only
from their own
experiences
what was
dangerous
and what was valuable in their
environment,
instead,
they
could
rely
on the collective
memory
of
past generations,
and
possibly
avoid
repeating
their
mistakes. The
knowledge helped
them to achieve a cer-
tain amount of control over the environment.
[Further-
more,
he
continues] Legends
did not
just convey
use-
ful information
they
also
passed
on an enormous
amount of irrelevant
details,
or details that make sense
only
in certain
specific
historical situations. This is in-
evitable because
anyone
who wants to
pass
on a
per-
sonally experienced
truth
usually
cannot
distinguish
the essential element of that truth from its incidental
features
(Csikszentmihilyi 1993, 57-8).
But I see these
seemingly
irrelevant details as flexible
enough
to become crucial in
furthering
the
legend proc-
ess that authorises transmitters to switch focus and
promote
incidental and irrelevant details to the essen-
tial, and demote essentials into inessential
obscurity,
in
response
to both social
change
and
personal creativity.
Fieldworkers are in a difficult
position
as
they
delve
into the
mentality
of a local
community. They
have to
rely
on earlier collectors' information
preserved
in
pro-
fessional archives and
literary sources, most of which
are
incomplete
and biased, unlikely
to meet the
high
What Is A
Belief Legend? 37
standards of
accuracy required by
modern folklore
scholarship.
At
best,
old files can
give
us a
general
idea
about
folklife,
and
highlight
some
prominent
stories or
customs that
might
be
explored,
and
open
the
way
to
discovering
more
complete
variants. But it is a frus-
trating experience
that,
by following
the rules of
sys-
tematic fieldwork
approach,
folklorists end
up by
col-
lecting
the variants of the
already
known,
without find-
ing
what remained
hidden,
because the
unanticipated,
the
unexpected,
the
not-yet-known keeps escaping
at-
tention. Unless an accidental occurrence
brings
them
in touch with an
emergent
manifestation of
belief,
folk-
lorists row their boats on familiar waters towards
pre-
dictable destinations.
A
particular
event made me realise how hard it is to
learn about the unknown. At the time I was
working
on the first edition of
my
book Folktales and
Society
which
was to be
published
in the folklore series of the Institut
fir
deutsche Volkskunde in Berlin. The Institute's direc-
tor, Wolfgang
Steinitz,
distinguished
folklorist and
spe-
cialist in
Finno-Ugric,
Slavic and German
linguistics,
accompanied
me to the
village
of
Kakasd,
the settle-
ment of ethnic
Szekelys
from the Bucovina which I in-
vestigated
in the book. It was an
unusually
hot late
spring,
without
any
rain. The
dry
soil was hard to break
up
for
planting,
and
people
feared
crop
failure.
Along
with two other
folklorists,
we arrived at the house of
the Andrisfalvis. Uncle
Gyuri,
the
storyteller,
was in-
side,
while his
wife,
village
comedian Erzsi
Matyi,
bus-
ied herself
trying
to
plant
onions in the
arid soil of the
backyard vegetable patch.
As we went
through
the
kitchen door to
greet
her,
a flock of clouds
gathered
above
us,
causing
a sudden
downpour.
What we saw
made us
stop
in awe. The rain filled the cracks of the
dry
soil as the
planting
woman buried the onion seed-
lings
with the handle of an axe. One
by
one,
she started
to draw a circle with her index
finger
around
each,
flex-
ing
her knees and
bowing
in slow
rhythm,
almost touch-
ing
the
ground
with her head while
chanting
a monoto-
nous,
wailing pentatonic prayer
with a
refrain,
"O Holy
Virgin,
Mother of God." She seemed to be in a
trance,
not
noticing
us while she
performed, tearfully suppli-
cating
the divine
powers.
We realised we were
eyewit-
nesses to a ritual
rainmaking ceremony
that outsiders
never see. We stood there, frustrated, totally unpre-
pared,
without a
tape
recorder or a camera to
capture
the
performance, watching
the numinous moment un-
wittingly experienced.
It was
only
a brief
episode;
the
rain
stopped,
and we retreated into the kitchen to
dry
ourselves.
Regaining
her
composure,
Erzsi returned
from the
yard
and
cheerfully greeted us, offering
re-
freshments.
Casually,
I mentioned that we saw her
planting
and
singing something
that we did not hear
clearly, would she
please
tell us? "What did I mean?"
she asked in return. "Didn't I know all of her
songs
already?" "Not this," I insisted. "Could she
repeat
it?"
"O that," she said, "that was a
hymn
from the
hymnal,
nothing special."
And she started to recite three
hymns,
none of which showed
any
resemblance to what we
had heard. She
honestly
tried but could not
give an
account of her recital.All
my
efforts failed; I never heard
it
again
from
anyone
else, and even local folklorist
Adaim
Sebestydn
could not
explain
this
magic chant,
informed
by
belief.
If we
speak
of "belief" in the
meaning
of the folklor-
ist, as a
disposition,
as an
underlying
mental attitude
or behavioural
pattern
that manifests in
audibly
or vis-
ibly
observable texts as
generic ingredients
of a belief
system, amounting
to a
(local
or
subcultural) religion,
we can also relate these beliefs to
pertinent legend types,
like motifs to
pertinent types.
But before we can
speak
about belief in
relationship
to
legend,
we have to make
it clear that we mean here
religious
belief, not
general
belief. General belief is understood as trust in the ve-
racity
of someone's
information, "as
disposition
to re-
spond
in certain
ways
when the
appropriate
issue arises,
like our belief in the
dependability
of our
neighborhood
cobbler"
(Quine
and Ullian 1970, 49).
There are
many
definitions of homo
religiosus,
the holder of
theological
belief: belief in the existence of God,
immortality
of the
soul and moral
government
of the world, and the seeker
of salvation
by
faith, trust and obedience
(Bellah 1970,
4). Religion
is related to the condition that humans live
in
uncertainty
because
they
cannot
fully
know and com-
prehend
the world around
them,
live in social relation-
ships
that limit their natural instincts, and are left to
digest
their own unanswered
questions (Dux 1982, 158).
But we also have to
speak
of homo
sapiens:
it is
equally
as normal for humans to seek scientific
knowledge by
exploring
observable
regularities
of cause and effect in
the real world.
The two kinds of beliefs were identified
by
folklor-
ists as the kernels of two
separate legend categories:
Glauben- and
Wissensagen (belief
and
knowledge leg-
ends) (Rdhrich 1958, 665)
that is, memorates and
chronikates
(von Sydow
1948, 87),
to characterise
leg-
ends about
supernatural
encounters as
opposed
to
leg-
ends about real historical events and heroes. These
neatly
balanced
categories
devised in the tobacco and
caffeine scented armchair of
scholars,
far from the
field,
have failed to work because it is
impossible
to deter-
mine
categories
on the
grounds
of whether their claim
is belief or
knowledge, imaginary
or factual, because
all
legendry
is rooted in the domain of extranormal,
metaphysical ideology.
Even the
seemingly
rational
horror stories contain coincidences of irrational, super-
natural dimensions, and the so-called historical
legends
have no valid historical sources. These stories were
lifted from their historical context and relocated into
an anachronistic and
mythical environment. Neverthe-
less, the
juxtaposition
of belief and
knowledge, religion
and science, turned out to be
productive
in
dealing
with
the
growing body
of
legendry
in the
technological age.
Indeed, during
the last decades, the world has been
inundated
by
a
staggering body
of mass media treated
legendry
based on
supernatural
or extranormal belief
38 Linda
Digh
claiming
to be cleared and authenticated
by
scientific
research and
knowledge.
With
daily appearances
on
TV,
radio and in the
printed
media,
spokespersons
of
pseudo-scientific
and scientific establishments have
gained
tremendous
popularity
and have contributed
to an
unprecedented
boom of traditional
religious
be-
lief. If
prestigious
authorities-like Harvard
psychia-
try professor John
E. Mack-become serious about UFO
aliens
(Willwerth 1994), they
are
actually joining
theo-
logians
in the assertion of the
popular spiritualist
be-
lief in
guardian angels among
us and are
lending
a hand
to the evolution of a new
complex
of
age-old
traditional
legendry.
Likewise,
the
latest,
but now
declining, chap-
ter of American satanic
conspiracy legendry
consistent
with the Christian Church doctrine was
supported by
theologians
as much as
by
learned health
profession-
als,
psychiatrists
and
psychologists.
In consideration
of the scientification of
religious
belief
through
the in-
stitutionalisation of
legends by
the so-called occult or
borderline
sciences,
as well as
by religious
establish-
ments and cults
focusing
on the
practice
and
spread
of
distinct kinds of belief
phenomena,
it becomes neces-
sary
to deal with the semblance of
dichotomy
between
religion
and science in the
thinking
and behaviour of
people
when
they
tell, listen,
and react to
hearing leg-
ends,
and as
they
form
groups
and
develop
ritualised
practices.
As the two kinds of beliefs are
intimately
re-
lated,
often
inseparably
intertwined, confused,
and in
conflict with each
other,
belief-any degree
thereof be-
tween
positive
and
negative
extremes-becomes the
lifeline of
legend
communication. The
controversy
be-
tween these two worldviews is the trademark of the
legend;
it
emerges
from the natural human
uncertainty
about the nature of
things
which both science and reli-
gion try
to resolve.
Nobel-prize-winning physiologist,
Robert W.
Holley,
said
that,
"Religion
deals with the
'unknowable,'
sci-
ence with the
'knowable.'
Conflicts arise when
people
think
something
that has been 'unknowable' has be-
come 'knowable"'
(Holley
1992, 179). Questioned
about
his
thoughts
of the
concept
of God and the existence of
God,
Holley
answered:
I consider the existence of God as
"unknowable,"
and
therefore
part
of one's
religious
view. There is a
great
deal to marvel or wonder about in the universe.
Whether one wants to attribute the marvelous
things
to the existence of God
depends upon
one's nature and
experience.
Such a belief
appeals
to some
people
and
not to others. Since it is unknowable, I think it should
be a
very personal
matter
(Holley 1992, 180).
I
hope
I have made
my position
clear:
any legend
researcher needs to focus on the attitude towards be-
lief
expressed by
individual
participants
in the
legend
process
to
gain insight
into the dialectics
by
means of
which
believability,
the
purpose
of
any legend
commu-
nication, are debated.
Speaking
about belief as the core
ingredient
of
leg-
end, I do not mean
unspecific, general,
informal con-
versations about life and death and the
beyond,
that
may
be called in a
general
and
unspecified way
"reli-
gious" by ethnographic
observers. The
currently
mod-
ish reflexive
interviewing
and
description
in the field
may
have its virtues as an
attempt
to reduce biased
judgment
of data rather than
looking
down at the sub-
ject
from the researcher's
ivory
tower. David Hufford
is correct in
noticing
"serious
inadequacies
in the
study
of belief," but what he and his co-authors offer does
not
"help
such reform"
(Hufford 1995, 3).
On the con-
trary, they
add more
inadequacies.
While
promoting
cultural
relativism, these folklorists become more con-
cerned with their own reaction to
encountering
research
subjects
than with the belief
they
were
supposed
to
study,
and end
up presenting ethnography
of them-
selves and their own
speculations.
While
they
are criti-
cal or
ignorant
of what others have done, all authors
except
William A. Wilson
speak
about folk belief or re-
ligion abstractedly,
not in data-based concrete terms
(Wilson 1995, 13-22).
Time after
time,
they forget
what
questions they promised
to
address,
and
explicate
their
own
opinion
of what folklorists do
wrong.
For exam-
ple, making
the
charge
that folklorists "maintained an
extremely problematical terminology
and
conceptual-
isation of the
religion they study,"
Leonard Primiano
does not offer another
conceptualisation;
he
merely
proposes
to
replace
the term "folk
religion"
with "ver-
nacular
religion"
to
remedy
a
"scholarly misrepresen-
tation"
(Primiano 1995, 36-52).
This
style
of reflexive
approach
does not eliminate
the
"us,
the rational
scholars;
they,
the
believing
folk"
conflict
typical
in interviewer-interviewee
relationships,
but allows unrestricted discussion of
general
methodo-
logical problems, blurring
the intended focus.
I do not feel it safe to
rely
on
my
own instincts and
speculations
about the substance and nature of belief
in a
community.
Rather,
I
accept
the commonsense
guid-
ance of
existing
conditions and describe observed
events from the
viewpoints
of the
community's repre-
sentative individuals.
Every community
is a universe
in
itself,
the
vantage point
from which the outside world
is
being judged.
To
quote Csikszentmihailyi again:
Cultures can inculcate their values and worldviews.
Most human
groups
believe that
they
are the chosen
people,
situated at the center of the
universe.
They
be-
lieve that their
understanding
of the world is the
only
one that makes sense
(Csikszentmihilyi 1993, 59).
The
religious ideology, worldview, principles
and
concepts
of faith, worship, piety,
and rules of
morality
and
sociability
of western
society
were established and
are still dominated
by
the Christian Church. From the
early
Middle
Ages on, the Church has set the rules of
education, law and
governance. Society
has been
shaped by religious institutions, and in the course of
time
struggles
for
power
and dominance have
split up
the one and
only
Christian Church into innumerable
denominations. Ritual
practices
and
legendry
have
nev-
ertheless
continually
reinforced
underlying
belief
throughout
the western world
including Europe
and
What Is A
Belief Legend?
39
North America. The same
legends
have
persisted
from
the
early
Middle
Ages up
to this
day.
The
parallel preva-
lence of identical
legends
in
literary, legal, theological,
historical,
medical and
geographical
documents and in
ongoing
oral tradition shows the
tenacity
of these sto-
ries. Variation in the basic
plots
are reasonable
adjust-
ments to environmental and
ideological changes
that
enable them to
stay
relevant and survive. Modern
leg-
ends still are based on Christian education
according
to the
Bible,
which remains the basic source of knowl-
edge
and belief on all
levels,
irrespective
of denomina-
tion or
personal
choices in western
society.
This knowl-
edge
admits the
pious,
the unbeliever and the
sceptic
to a
homogeneous
cultural
platform
that enables eve-
ryone
to
participate
in rites of
passage
and calendar
festivals,
to
appreciate
arts and
literature,
to
distinguish
right
from
wrong,
and to
cope
with the notion of mor-
tality.
If we want to
study
the
legends
of the members
of a
community,
we have to define their
interpretation
of belief as
they
define it
comparatively
with the ca-
nonic
religion
from which it was derived.
Folklorists
regarded
belief manifested in
legends
as
some sort of
archaism,
a
primitive
worldview,
an un-
critical,
naive scientific
interpretation
of observed real-
ity.
As
outsiders,
they surveyed legend telling
commu-
nities with an air of
superiority, assuming
that the nar-
rators of these absurd stories
(in
which
average peo-
ple,
not
epic
heroes,
experience supernormal
or absurd
encounters without
leaving
the
landscape
and climate
of
ordinary life)
must believe what
they
narrate. Schol-
ars were
puzzled by
the
peculiarities
of the
legend,
so
different from the
magic
tale in which the hero is the
only
real
person representing
our
point
of
view,
sur-
rounded
by,
and related
to,
irrational
landscapes, peo-
ple,
animals and
objects
as featured
by Liithi's
Allverbundenheit
concept (Liithi 1975, 330).
This contras-
tive
conceptualisation
of
reality
in
legend
and tale was
convincingly
introduced in Lutz
R6hrich's
classic book
Mdrchen
und Wirklichkeit
(Rdhrich 1974) arguing
that
identical narrative motifs are elastic
enough
to accom-
modate the
message
of both
genres.
But
folklorists
have
been slow to
recognise
that the
painstaking,
factual
depiction
of the situation serves the
purpose
of authen-
ticating
the narrative. As an essential
stylistic
feature
of the
legend
it serves the
purpose
of its
telling.
The
elaboration of details
erroneously
convinced
early
fieldworkers that tellers and listeners
truly
believe the
legend they
tell. Narrators were
expected
to articulate
vestiges
of the belief
system
of an archaic
pan-animis-
tic world; any
scholars
judged
narrators' hesitation in
admitting personal experience
as evidence of the ero-
sion of archaic values and the demise of folklore. And
because Ranke convinced his followers that
positive
belief is the essence of
legends,
collectors
routinely
asked their informants whether
they
believed what
they
had
just
recited. What an
arrogant, condescending
defi-
nition was the one crafted first
by
Ranke in 1925, that
legends are, "popular, objectively
untrue
fantasy
sto-
ries told for true and
presented
in the
simple style
of
an
experience report"
(Ranke 1925, 4).
How can the
visting
scholar know what is
objectively
true or untrue
and for whom, and whether the contextualisation of
the content means
"telling
for true," when identical
leg-
ends
may
contain other
tellers'
doubts or disbeliefs?
This authoritative definition,
based on archaic
village
research,
still
persists among contemporary legend
scholars whose informants
(not ignorant
folk
anymore)
may
be as well educated as
they
are. We should be
aware that the
religion-based
stock of
supernatural
be-
lief is
stronger
than the
power
of
enlightenment
and
dominates
today's emergent legendry
as much as
ever,
and is shared
by
bearers of all
social,
educational and
economic classes.
Why
do folklore collectors
(not
mental health
carers)
insist on
asking,
"Do
you
believe it? Is it true?" The
question
itself
provokes
distortion. In the first
place,
belief is
fluctuating,
hesitant and
selective,
not consist-
ent or absolute. In the second
place,
the informant has
many
reasons not to tell what he or she
really
believes.
Even with the best
intentions,
the
given
conditions,
re-
lationships, personality
features and
momentary
dis-
positions
make
any
disclosure of
belief/! disbelief/!
hesi-
tation
improvised
and
insincere,
therefore useless for
research. The
fluctuating
mental states of tellers and
responsive
audiences can be discerned from the
spon-
taneous
performance,
without
asking embarrassing
personal questions impossible
to answer
(Becker
and
Geer
1957, 28-32).
Here is an
example
to illuminate the
complexity
of
contradictions in the
presentation
of a
legend.
It reveals
the uncertainties
surrounding legend experience,
the
experiencer's
need to
try interpretations
and resolve
troubling questions.
This
story,
known
throughout
Indiana,
often told in
conjunction
with visits to
Wayne
Pruitt's
grave
in the
Orange County cemetery
south of Bedford
(see
Clements
1969, 90-6), provokes
the
ambiguous feelings
of the
presenter
characteristic of natural
legend telling.
"Did
you
hear about the chain in
Prospect,
Indiana?
Again,
I don't know all the
details, 'cause I don't
really
pay
attention to these stories
(laughter)
but ... 'cause
they
tend to
spook
me
(laughter),
so I kinda
ignore
them.
Again,
I'm not sure how
many years ago
this
was, ... a while
ago
but this man was accused for kill-
ing
his wife, strangling
her with a chain. And, I don't
believe he was
actually
convicted of the crime but he
died before his innocence could be
proven.
And on his
deathbed he
supposedly
told someone in
testimony
to
his innocence that this tombstone, ... there would
ap-
pear
a chain in the
shape
of a cross that would
join
link
by
link. And
anyway,
this chain did
appear
and it came
on the side of the tombstone and ... where it would
cross. And lots of
people
made the
trip
to see it. And
after a while vandals
got
to it, you know, and
they
had
to
replace
the tombstone, ...
entirely.
And now the chain
is there on this new tombstone also. And this one, my
friends took me
up
there to see and I
actually
saw the
links on the stone. Now, I don't know if the ... comes
back but
they
told me
they
do if
you stay
all
night.
40
Linda
Digh
And there is also another
story
... that some
profes-
sors from
I.U.
has
gone
to see this. And I'm sure this is
total fabrication. But when
they
went to look at the
tombstone to make sure that
nobody
has taken a chain
and
pounded
it into the stone, or,
you know,
to alter it
in some
way.
And
they
could not
find
any
evidence
that this would
happen.
And there was one
person
who
totally
believed in this, the
spirit coming
back, and an-
other one said this is
just
the
doing
of another
prank-
ster. And as
they
were
leaving Prospect,
as the road
winds down
backwards,
and as
they
were
driving,
this
car came out of nowhere behind
them,
and it was
speed-
ing up,
and came
closer,
and
closer,
and run them off
the road. And this
person
who did not
believe,
this one
was
driving
the car. And when
they
found the
car, the
person
who did believe in the
story
was
totally
unin-
jured,
and the
person
who did
not,
was dead.And there
was a
logging
chain
wrapped
around his neck. So ...
Here the
story
ends,
accompanied by
lots of nervous
laughter
from the audience of some
forty
students. The
narrator was
Debbie,
a
twenty-one-year
old
journal-
ism
major
at
Harper
Residence Hall on the
Bloomington
campus,
31 October 1989. This
legend
consists of three
parts:
the
introductory personal statement,
and two
selfcontained
legends
interlinked to illustrate the su-
periority
of
religious
belief over
knowledge.
The first
story,
a
fabulate,
is
appended by
a didactic memorate.
The
innocently
accused man is exonerated
by
divine
intervention which makes a miraculous
sign appear
on
the
gravestone,
but the
sign
is ridiculed and
destroyed
by
unbelievers. The raconteuse
begins
with an
apology
for her
scanty knowledge
of the account. The formu-
laic
modesty,
however, means also that she does not
want to be identified as
gullible,
attracted to "these sto-
ries";
she is aware of the fact that
public opinion
does
not condone
supernatural
belief. Her
apology
is under-
scored
by
her nervous
giggle
as she admits that not
paying
attention does not mean that she
ignores
these
stories. On the
contrary,
she is scared of them because
they spook
her. After this
presentation
of
ambiguity,
she
puts
the main
story
at a
distance,
in a
depersonal-
ised manner as if she were
trying
to recall the details
told to her
by
an unnamed
person.
She even uses the
word
"supposedly"
when
telling
about the testimonial
appearance
of the chain on the tombstone as evidence
that the man had been innocently accused. Describing
graphically
the formation of the chain "in the
shape
of
a
cross"--a
known motif of an
exemplum mirabilis-she
argues
for its
veracity by
reference to "lots of
people
(who) made the
trip
to see it," as
pilgrimages
to a lat-
ter-day
saint's shrine, similar to the
legend trip
of
young
people
in
anticipation
of a
supernatural manifestation.
A new
episode reports the miraculous
reappearance of
the cross on a
newly
erected tombstone after the
origi-
nal had been
destroyed by
vandals. Here, the tone of
the rhetoric of the
legend changes
from fabulate to
memorate. The narrator saw the new chain on the new
tombstone because her friends took her there. This time
she did not refuse to
pay
attention:
"I actually
saw the
links," she tells us, turning
herself into a
voluntary eye-
witness. But
again,
she hesitates to
say
if the chain is
still there and refers to others who told her that "it
comes back if
you stay
all
night." She does not
say it,
but it is
implied that the chain
appears
in similar cases,
when visitors
perform
certain rituals. The second
leg-
end confirms the miracle
story of the
innocently accused
man and warns
against
the
profaning
of divine
justice,
although, right
at the
beginning,
the narrator indicates
her own disbelief
by interjecting,
"I'm sure this is total
fabrication,"
confusing
her audience about the
point
she is
making.
This memorate is a didactic
story about
the
victory
of
religion
over science. Some rationalised
(negative)
variants of this
legend
attribute the
appear-
ance of the chain to the softness of Indiana limestone to
prove scientifically
that no divine interference has oc-
curred-someone
just
threw a
heavy
iron chain on the
grave
marker and that made the dent. As I was in-
formed
by
authorities in the stone
industry,
this is a
pseudo-scientific
belief statement
(an "anti-legend")
because not even the soft oolite can be dented this
way.
In this
story,
a
religious person
and a
sceptical
scientist
investigate
the cause of the miracle. The one who does
not believe trivialises it as
prankster's
trick with a chain,
and is
punished by strangulation
with a chain
(does
the mobile chain on the
grave
marker
perform
the ex-
ecution?),
after a
phantom
car runs their car off the road
as
they
are
departing.
The scientist who believes was
"totally uninjured-"
"when
they
found the car."
Seventeen
legends
were told that
night, inspired by
my
talk, the hot
apple
cider,
candlelight, pumpkin pie
and
spooky paraphernalia.
After the
people began
to
trade stories, I did not utter a sound nor did the two
graduate
folklore students who came
along.
This vari-
ant illustrates the
religious
nature of
underlying
belief
and the
ambiguous
attitude narrators
express
in accord-
ance with
legend
dialectics.
Compared
to other re-
corded variants of this
legend,
it also illustrates the
uniqueness
of the
meaning
of each variant. In this
case,
the last
part,
the
punishment
of the
agnostic professor
adds a new and
strong warning against
disbelief.
Legend
and
Belief
Now it is time to return to the
concept
"belief
legend"
as it was defined
by
folklorists at a time when distinc-
tion had to be made between the two basic narrative
genres-the legend, referred to as "true
story" by
na-
tive
European villagers;
and the
Mdrchen, what
they
called "a lie" in
appreciation of the creative
fantasy
of
tale tellers. That was the time when
practising
fieldworkers and
comparative text
philologists realised
that both
genres are based on a common belief
system,
a common monotheistic cultural
knowledge,
as is con-
vincingly documented
by
Stith
Thompson's Motif In-
dex. The motifs, the smallest
components of traditional
narratives-E334.2. Ghost haunts burial
spot; E384 Ghost
summoned
by music; G269.5. Witch causes haunted houses,
and so on-can be
regarded also as statements of be-
lief, expression of worldview, charged attitudes and
op-
What Is A
Belief Legend?
41
positions
between
fantasy
and
reality,
the knowable and
unknowable,
life and death. It was no
absurdity
when
legend
scholars
proposed
to
apply
the
MotifIndex
num-
bers for
legend
classification.
While "lie" translates as
fiction,
"truth" does not
necessarily
mean that
people
believe the
legends they
tell,
but rather that
legends
are about what real
people
experience
within their own
topographically
delimited
territory
in the real world. The real world is the refer-
ent of the
legend.
It is
presented
before the
legend
event
begins
and after it has
ended;
life is restored to ordi-
nariness.
Ordinary landscapes, ordinary people
are fea-
tured,
engaged
in their
daily
routines
when,
according
to
theologian
Rudolf Otto
(Otto 1958),
the sudden in-
trusion of the
ganz
andere,
the
numinous,
the tremendum
and the
fascinans
as a
religious experience
occurs and
transforms the world of
experiencers
for a moment.
That moment is the encounter of the mortal and the
immortal,
the rational and the
irrational,
as folklore
theorists Gotthilf
Isler,
Max
Liithi,
Gerhard
Heilfurth,
Hermann
Bausinger
and others have asserted.
The
incorporation
of
legend
motifs,
or full
legends,
into
magic
tales,
and the transformation of
legends
into
tales and tales into
legends, appears
as
ideological
recastings, connecting
and
contrasting
the
objectified
fictitious world of the tale with the
real,
supernatural
realm of
everyday.
In a
tale,
a real
person (like us)
makes
a labour contract and
performs
chores in an extranormal
world-the
lowly
hero tends and
grooms
the horses of
the seven headed
dragon up
on the
top
of the
sky-high
tree
(AT 468)-just
as
would
be
expected
from the vil-
lage
horseherd.
During my
student
years
in the
field,
I learned that
villagers
considered
legends
as information about ex-
perienced
human encounters with the
supernatural
world,
in
opposition
to the
general opinion
of academic
folklorists that these
"superstitious
stories" are based
on erroneous beliefs that characterise the
separate
real-
ity
of backward
villagers.
Some
proposed using
the
native term "true
story," general among European
peasantries (Dobos 1978);
other
proposals
included the
use of the
vague
term "traditions" or
"folk-talks,"
or
"folk-conversations,"
stressing
the
informality
of their
telling (Hegediis
1946; 1952).
References were made to
men's evening gatherings
in the
pub,
at homes or com-
munal
workplaces,
where
general
conversation
brought
up
a
miscellany
of
legend-like
stories. The terms
"be-
liefs and belief stories" were also used to
identify
su-
pernatural scary
stories
popular
in rural and urban cir-
cles (Dobos 1986, 170-90).
During
the
early 1960s, when I became interested in
the
legend,
I
accepted
the term
"belief story"
or
"belief
legend"
as
suggested by
Aurdl
Vajkai (Vajkai
1947, 55-
69)
in his
superb description
of the
legend cycle
of herds-
men of the
Bakony
woods
region. Herding,
an
impor-
tant, hereditary trade, gave privileges
and
respect
to
herdsmen, ranking high
above
agriculturalists. As the
story goes,
the herdsmen made
pacts
with the Devil in
order to
perfect
their
herding
skills and to make them-
selves
indispensable
to their
employers (Degh
1965b,
231-8 and
335-7).
As outdoor men,
living
in nature all
the
year
round,
they
were
recognised
"folk-scientists,
healers and
philosophers"
as well as eminent tellers of
legends. Vajkai's
"belief stories" were first- and second-
hand
personal experience
accounts. He
pointed
out that
belief had created and
integrated
the whole
cycle
of
narratives that
gained popularity
both in its
entirety
and in its
parts.
He saw
nothing
accidental in the fact
that this fusion of belief and
personal experience
made
a
strong
core of
unity
to
shape
the
episodes
of the
story.
Frequent repetition,
elaboration of details, and
person-
alisation stabilised the texts like those of
popular
bal-
lads or tales. He was
dealing
with
widespread pres-
tige-promoting
stories of
competing
clans of herdsmen,
stories that
displayed
the content
stability
of fabulates
while
maintaining
the
personalisation
of memorates.
The idea "belief
story"
or "belief
legend"
was
appeal-
ing
to me because
eighty per
cent of
Hungarian
folk
legendry
fitted the
category
known as
mythical
or
demonological (see
Hand
1965)
or
supernatural.
In
my
earlier works, I used this term also to describe less sta-
ble, less
coherent,
fragmentary
variants. In
fact,
I also
applied
the term to
episodes
or
motifs,
with or without
narrative
elements,
that
appeared
in
independent
us-
age
in
my experience,
because
they
also were
compos-
ite
parts
of a
complex
of which the
analytical category
of a
legend type
could be
pieced together (Degh
1965a;
1971).
This was the era when members of the
European
legend
commission discussed the
classifiability
of
leg-
ends.
Realising
that the same
story
had
only
a handful
of
relatively
stable,
complete,
elaborate and coherent
versions and that the rest-hundreds or thousands-
exist and function in what the outsider
may
see as in-
coherent bits and
pieces, they
soon
gave up trying
to
create a
typology.
Fieldworkers should have realised
that functional documents of
living
culture are harder
to
pin
down than the
appealing,
but
petrified,
skeletons
of the
past,
and that to
explore
the extent of the
legend
as a
specific genre, they
need to turn to the
present
dynamics
of
emergent
bits and
pieces
of
legendry
shaped by
innovative bearers of tradition. But instead
of
starting in-depth
field observation of
legend proc-
esses to find characteristics that
truly distinguish
the
genre
from other folklore
genres, they
looked for those
that dissociate
legend
from
legend. Subcategories
were
identified, names
assigned
to each, according
to diverse
esoteric and exoteric
organising principles
and
worldviews, based on one
arbitrarily
chosen feature
judged
as
prominent
in
disregard
of others. For exam-
ple,
the
legend
about the chain on the tombstone
quoted
above could be identified
arbitrarily
as
contemporary
legend, cemetery legend, ghost story, adolescent
leg-
end, religious legend,
and memorate with
equal justifi-
cation. Would this mean that the variants of the same
legend
need to be
placed
in
separate categories?
Whoever found a handful of
legends
in the
library
or
among
a
group
of schoolchildren
proposed
a new
42 Linda
Digh
name that characterised more the
investigator's
than
the bearer's interest. The
hairsplitting
exercise of dis-
criminating
between
categories
and
subcategories,
as-
signing
names,
and
determining "analytical categories"
began early
and is still
going
on, as if modern authors
would be
persuaded
to invent new terms for their new
collections in line with the fashionable trends of other
disciplines.
New terms are also a
risky
business because
they
often turn out to be the reinvention of the wheel.
Confusion and chaos is created
by
the
many
terms be-
cause:
1) they pertain,
not
only
to the
complete
narra-
tive,
but to its close
kin,
parts
and
ingredients; 2)
the
terms often are
synonyms
not
easily
translatable into
English
from the
language
of their
origin;
and
3)
no
distinction is made between
heuristic,
operational
and
temporarily
useful,
and more stable
naming. Beyond
that,
titles
may
be
assigned by
scholars or
by
the bear-
ers and can indicate
topic,
content,
main
character,
the
witness,
style,
mood,
place,
time,
or
purpose
of
telling.
Robin
Gwyndaf's listing
of
superstition categories
A
to
J (227-8)
confirms
Leopold
Schmidt's observation
that "the domain of the
legend
is as
large
as the
totality
of folk
culture,
one can
say
no
part
of
it,
from settle-
ment and
house,
to
proverb
and
saying
exist wihtout
being
touched also
by
the
legend" (Schmidt 1963, 107).
In
agreement
with Gillian Bennett that the
prolifera-
tion of
contradictory usage
of
terminology
has
lately
increased the confusion
surrounding
the
genre (Bennett
1989, 291), I
feel it is time to
stop seeking
more
legend
subspecies
or
potential legend ingredients,
because
doing
so undermines the likelihood of an
agreeable
compromise.
Collaborative effort is needed to find the
common denominator that makes
legend
a
legend,
whether it be
long,
short,
fragmentary,
demonic,
horri-
ble,
disgusting,
comic,
grotesque, entertaining,
first or
third
person,
rural, urban,
oral or
printed,
believed or
not believed.
Bennett,
the most
original
and
prolific representa-
tive of the
contemporary legend
avant
garde,
has a
strong
record in field observation and
analysis
of su-
pernatural
belief-related
legendry.
Indeed,
there are
some
interesting
ideas in her
essay,
as she reminds us
of
many
modes of
conversing
about
community
beliefs.
I am
pleased
that she mentions certain
legends (or
memorates and other
legend-like accounts)
that are
implicitly belief-oriented, told in the context of
"the
discussion of a cultural belief
complex,"
and that func-
tion as
"the exploration
of that
complex" (ibid., 301).
I
wholeheartedly agree
with her; several of
my
articles
have described the
legend
as a conversational
genre
in
which
participants (proponents)
state and debate the
nature of their belief in the account. The difference be-
tween us is
only
that I do not see a need to
distinguish
"belief story"
or
"belief legend"
from the rest of
legendry,
because the
exploration
of
believability
is
present
in all
legends
since it constitutes the essential
purpose
of the
genre.
The
legend-telling conversation,
as Bennett
correctly states, is informal, often
fuzzy,
be-
cause it is a
spontaneous occurrence not
prepared
like
a
storytelling
occasion for a featured narrator, as
Bennett's
transcript
also indicates.
However, the inter-
view-style
case
study-the transcript
of a
thirty
minute
classroom
legend telling
of six
fifteen-year-old young-
sters-is not
produced
in the relaxed
gathering
when
the
proper, sub-logical atmosphere
can
develop
and
lead to
spontaneous
reflections and conversation about
supernatural experiences.
The
interviewer-prompted,
artificially staged speedy
recital of
twenty-five
items
distorts
reality
and is unfit for scientific
scrutiny.
It does
not
support
the
renaming proposal
nor Bennett's con-
clusion;
the fact that these items are also
legends
has
been
accepted by
most
legend specialists.
The materi-
als
presented
are
ghost
stories;
that is, classic
legends
whose
popularity
fluctuates over time but whose con-
tents constitute the
majority
of the current
legend rep-
ertoire of Americans.
They give testimony
to the cur-
rent intensification of
religious
belief.
However,
to de-
pend
on schoolchildren's stories to make a
general
theo-
retical
proposition
is
misleading.
For too
long
it has been
an academic
practice
of American folklorists to collect
legends
from
students-mostly college age-in
their
classes or to
assign graduate
students to collect
legends
from
college, high
school or
grade
school children. Our
archives are
predominantly
filled
by young people's
first- or second-hand
legends.
I do not
dispute
that stu-
dent
groups
as
occupational-, gender-
and
age-groups
develop
their own
legend repertoires (see
Grider
1976;
Tucker
1977),
but the lack of
collecting
from adults re-
inforces the
misconception
that
legends, particularly
ghost
and horror
stories,
are the critical
genre
of chil-
dren and
adolescents,
and distorts the fact that there is
a
largely untapped body
of
legendry circulating among
adults who
actually
enculturate their children into the
legend
culture.2 The
interview-produced
conversational
legends
in Bennett's
transcript
could have been col-
lected from more articulate
adults;
more natural
leg-
end
exchange
would be more
convincing
for
generali-
sation about
legend
and belief.
Contemporary legend
students can
gain
from read-
ing
and
rereading
the works of earlier authors and
evaluate them
according
to their
chronological signifi-
cance. We have a brilliant and enthusiastic international
team of
researchers,
capable
of
measuring
the devel-
opmental trajectory
of
legend scholarship, sorting
out
the dated and resolved
problems, finding
and revital-
ising
valuable ideas that have remained unnoticed on
library
shelves. It is time to reverse the work order: we
need more data
gathering
before we can build a con-
vincing legend theory.
Much can be learned from the
history
of
legend study, particularly
because it devel-
oped
in close collaboration
among specialists
as the
original literary-philological
interest transformed into
a
sociologically
based
study
of
personal creativity.
The term
"belief legend/story"
first
appeared
as a
heuristic, not as a
theoretically established, term. Fol-
lowing Vajkai, Dagmar
Klimovi, Jaromir
Jech, C.V.
Cistov, Brynjulf
Alver and Otto Blehr submitted their
interpretations
of the term at the Liblice
meeting
of the
What Is A
Belief Legend?
43
legend
commission of the International
Society
for Folk
Narrative Research
(ISFNR) (see
Fabula 9
[1967]). Along
with other
commentators,
they
identified oral
prose
narratives in the field and
attempted
to describe and
explain
the
relationship
between communal and
per-
sonal variants of identical contents and their
potential
transgeneric
affinities. Andre
Jolles's original
"einfache
Formen"
(Jolles 1930)
idea
triggered
this
interest, most
fruitful in
documenting
the transitional nature of liv-
ing
oral tradition
(as
discussed
by Bausinger [1980,
225-
36]),
and in
forming legend-related expressions
such
as belief
concepts,
rumours,
reports,
cases,
experience
stories,
pseudo-legends,
anecdotes,
horror
stories,
and
so on. It seems
impossible
to
stop
collectors from nam-
ing
their items as
they
see it
fit;
and I would
say,
let
them do it. It is
only
the
comparative analyst
who must
find the
proper place
for the
piece
someone somewhere
informally
named,
and who is not
obliged
to take such
label
seriously,
in the
grand
scheme of
things.
Bennett's
proposition concerning
"belief-related
gen-
res" follows the
suggestion
of the reclusive
Norwegian
folklorist Otto Blehr who
distinguished
"belief
story"
from "belief
legend" (Blehr 1967, 259-63).
Seven
years
later,
Bleir
published
a
book,
elaborating
further the
distinction between belief
legend
and belief
story,
a dif-
ference that does not deviate from von
Sydow's
dis-
tinction between the
depersonalised
fabulate and the
ego-centred
memorate
(Blehr 1974).
The merit of Blehr's
book
lies,
not in
making
this
distinction,
but rather in
his excellent
fieldwork,
his model
recording
of a treas-
ury
of
legends
of a
community
and,
above
all,
his in-
terpretation
of local folk belief as
religion, showing
the
interconnectedness of
theology
and
elite
and folk reli-
gion
as the source of
legendry.
Bennett is correct that
Blehr's belief stories are
legends
as much as her
"be-
lief-related
genres
and other oddities" are also
legends.
Blehr's well focused rhetorical
questions
and treatment
of
ambiguously
used terms revolve around the ideas
of von
Sydow,
his
disciples
and successors. In
regard
to
Wayland
Hand's
preoccupation
with "belief tradi-
tions,"
Bennett has
correctly
inferred that "he
clearly
thought
that
they
were
legends" (Bennett 1989, 290).
As
already
stated,
Hand used the word
superstition,
that
is,
superstitious
belief in the sense of:
A
challenge
to the
accepted
view of
things,
whether
from a civil or
judical perspective,
or a dissent from
religious precepts
and
prevailing
moral customs. This
retreat from
authority
is
accomplished
not so much
by
breaking away
from
accepted
norms of
society
and of
the church, as it is
by merely holding
fast to older ideas
and modes of
thought
that have all been abandoned
(Hand 1981,
l:xxx).
But his
profound knowledge
of beliefs
necessarily
led
to his
discovery
that
"superstitions" (statements of be-
lief) are,
"rarely,
if ever discussed in a detached
way;
they
are lived and
experienced," "Customs
often
rep-
resent the
acting
out of belief, and memorates and
leg-
ends illustrate belief in actual
examples" (Hand, 1968,
225).
The
recognition
that belief can be
expressed
in
acts and in
telling prompted
Hand to
appeal
to his col-
leagues
for the construction of anAmerican
legend
clas-
sification
system long
before a feasible collection of texts
was assembled. This was the situation when I met him
at the first International
Society
for Folk Narrative Re-
search
(ISFNR) congress
in Kiel. Hand's idea that be-
lief interconnects custom and narrative was
appealing
to
me,
and we
agreed
to start
collecting examples
to
show the intricacies of text variables held
together by
common belief and to
present
a
joint paper
on our find-
ings
at the next
congress.
For
years
we worked on the
project
and
exchanged
materials via airmail corre-
spondence
between Los
Angeles
and
Budapest.
But we
ran into irreconcilable differences in our
thinking.
As a
philologist,
Hand assembled and constructed units of
formally
and
thematically
similar but
generically
unre-
lated
beliefs,
rituals and
legends,
taken from
literary
or
archival sources in diverse American
regional
subcul-
tures;
while
my examples
were field
observed, identi-
cal cases of belief
performed
both
dramatically
and
narrationally
in the same
community.
I
presented my
findings
at the 1964 Athens
congress (Degh 1965a),
and
Hand
put together
and read our co-authored
paper
at
the 1969 Bucharest
congress
which I did not attend. He
was correct in
looking
for the
legend
in the web of tra-
ditions based on
belief,
but he
depended
on
literary
sources,
not on
personal
observation.
To
argue
here
against
the use of a
category
called
"belief
legend" (Glaubenssage, Glaubensfabulate),
"folk
belief
story"
or "belief tale" as a
scholarly concept,
I
have had to discuss a number of
seemingly separate
issues
including
ideas of traditional and modern schol-
ars,
the formal and the
ideological
constructs of the
leg-
end as a
genre
and the
attempts
at
characterisation,
clas-
sification and
naming,
in the
hope
of
suggesting
a
plat-
form of collaboration for
breaking
the
present
dead-
lock and
opening
a new
path
toward
understanding
the
legend. Operationally,
the term "belief
legend"
played
an
important
role at the time
legends
became
the
targets
of
ethnographic study,
and it was
helpful
in
exploring
the multitude of
ways religious
belief ma-
nipulates legend
formation. But the lack of
stability
in
belief,
as seen in communal and individual
uncertainty,
causes the fluctuation of
practice,
and leads to
unpredictability
of the narrative
summary.
This condi-
tion makes traditional
approaches-classification and
so
on-impossible.
The more
subcategories,
the
greater
chaos we create.
International folklorists who have learned their trade
and are used to the
practical
tools of the
comparative
method will be able to
analyse
this mass of data
by
identifying
content units for
general understanding,
and
find out what
they
are best
qualified
to
explore:
what
legends
mean to their bearers, and how
they
affect these
bearer's lives.As so
many people
have stated since W.E.
Peuckert's book Geburt und Antwort der
mythischen
Welt
(Peuckert 1965), legends
seek answers about the nature
of the
supernatural
world and its effect on
people.
Our
44 Linda
Digh
guiding light
should be the inherent belief core and its
alterations,
because the
position
of belief
varies,
not
only
from
person
to
person,
but from
telling
to
telling by
the
same
person
under
changing
conditions. The
legend
experience
is
pessimistic,
often
tragic,
even if it can be
turned into the
absurd,
the
weird, brutal, cruel,
uncanny
and
grotesque.
The
underlying philosophy
is a
painful
admission of
helplessness
and
impending
defeat. How-
ever,
by submitting
to the
inevitable-mortality-the
worldview of the
legend
can
interpret tragic
outcome
as
hope
and
joyous expectation
of
immortality.
All
ghost
stories are
anticipations
of a Christian
spiritual
after-
life: if
ghosts
can
return,
there is a
happier
existence
beyond
the
grave;
and we will also be able to return.
This
personal
and collective
meaning
of
legends (or
negation
of
it)
is more or less inherent in all
legend
texts,
revealed
by
the
dynamics
of the
legend
dialectics.
Conversation about
belief,
the
contemplation
of hu-
man
destiny,
is on the mind of
everyone
born into this
world. It is the common denominator of all
legends.
Therefore our field
study
of
legend
needs to address
and build on the local
religious system
and its
every-
day practices.
Folkloristic
methodology
has
developed
specific approaches
for such sensitive narrator-centred
depth
research.
Being
a humanistic
field,
folkloristics
is more focused on
personal creativity
than are related
disciplines.
We
pay special
attention to the
life,
person-
ality
and
expressivity
of narrators as
they project
their
thoughts
and visions and articulate their concerns.
Thus,
our
approach
to the formulations of
legend
as a
genre,
not
irrespective
of
momentary,
individual
sty-
listic or content
variables,
will
open
new vistas to eth-
nographic (contemporary) legend study.
In our
time,
legend study
blossoms as we
intensify
our
speculation
about
legends
within
easy
reach of us.
We demand more
contextualisation,
more authentic
recording
and
interpretive analysis.
At the same
time,
a current
legend
boom is
generated by
the collabora-
tion of
legend
communicators and researchers. Urban
legend
fashion is our own
making:
the
marketing
of
texts for
popular
audiences has broadened the
range
of consumers and
producers,
and turned amateurs into
expert experiencers.
Folklorists obtain more texts for
their
popular
books,
yet
the
bestselling
collections do
not
represent
the
high
level of
authenticity
we demand
in our
essays,
as if researchers had different standards
for
theory
and for
publication.
As the number of col-
lections increases and
gains
new
ground
in
European
countries, the
quality
of texts decrease, lacking context,
spontaneity
and
originality.
The
published
items lack
also the freshness of oral narration; they
are either re-
written, brief, abstracted versions of oral or written texts
but more often than not, clippings
and summaries of
media sources. There is little variation in the not too
large, contingent
of well known
legend types.
Small
paperback
volumes also add a
miscellany
of anecdotes,
gossip
and
personal
accounts of
suspect origin;
one
might
wonder how these
boring
stories will re-enter
oral tradition after the "urban
legend"
fashion declines.
There is no
danger
of the demise of
legendry
when
the
currently
fashionable themes
pass
with the
specific
belief
systems
that infuse life into them:
religious
belief
and
irrationality
are still
growing
and
aiming
at new
peaks.
There are more
legends-past, present
and emer-
gent-at
hand than folklorists have ever dreamed
about.
My
recent five months' visit in central-eastern
Europe
infused me with the
pride
of a
clairvoyant:
I
had
predicted
a
spectacular
boom in
supernaturalism
as soon as the Iron Curtain was lifted. In
print,
televi-
sion, movies,
videos and
personal appearances,
famous
preachers, gurus
and occultists
spread
their doctrines
in
response
to
public
demand. UFO
clubs,
spiritualist
churches,
pagans,
shamans and satanists
emerge,
while
fundamentalist
religions
attract masses of seekers, com-
peting
with the restored denominations of traditional
religions.
A new
legendry
is in the
making
and
spread-
ing among peoples
troubled
by
the
consequences
of
political
and economic transformation. From
Billy
Graham to
Uri Geller, people
receive
encouragement
from the
sophisticated
western countries-the
gap
closes
rapidly,
as the former Soviet bloc assimilates the
level of folk
religiosity
of the free world. We have to
prepare
for a new
chapter
of
legendary
fashion as new
culture areas are
opened
and informed
by
their belief
system ripening
new stories.
To summarise
my
reflections on the idea "belief
leg-
end." With
many
asides and
detours,which
I could not
avoid because of
my
fear of
bypassing important
re-
lated
issues,
I have
argued
that I
oppose
the "rehabili-
tation" of the "rediscovered" belief stories and their
sheltering
under the umbrella term
"legend"
as Bennett
suggests.
I do not see her
proposal
as a first
step
to-
ward "serious attention"
providing
a "theoretical
framework" for this rehabilitation
(Bennett 1989, 304)
because I do not believe there is a need to retain the
distinction
implied
in such a
category.
Bennett herself
acknowledges
that all
legends
are "belief related
gen-
res"
(292).
What then is the theoretical benefit of the
retention of a term that
emphasises
"belief" as a
quali-
fier of
legend
without the
justification
of its exclusion
from other
legend categories?
The
preservation
of "be-
lief
legend"
does not eliminate but add to the confu-
sion
surrounding attempts
to define the
genre. My
ar-
gument
is based on
sufficiently
documented evidence
that belief is not
simply
related in some
unexplained,
unspecified way
to
legend
but that belief itself is the
core, the raison d'etre of the
legend
as a
genre.
But be-
yond belief, all additional
components
of
legend
defi-
nitions
provided by
scholars fit the definition of the
"belief
legend"
as well. The term
"legend"
serves our
purpose
fine.
Folklore Institute
Indiana
University, Bloomington, USA
What Is A
Belief Legend?
45
Notes
'Particular mention should be made of
ground breaking
works that called attention to folk
legends
in
popular
liter-
ary publications:
Albert Wesselski's
chapter
"Die Formen der
volkstiimlichen
Erzihlguts"
in Adolf
Spamer's
Deutsche
Volkskunde 1:216-48;
Walter Anderson's
clipping
of stories
from local
newspapers
and
weeklies;
Bausinger's
collection
and definition of
"everyday
narration"
("alltagliches
Erzdihlen"
(Bausinger
1975, 323-30)
and Rudolf Schenda's lat-
est
attempt
to trace the cultural
history
of folk narration in
Europe (1993).
2Gwyndaf's
chart illustrates
my description
of the two
kinds of manifestation of belief
(cf. Gwyndaf
1994, 230;
Digh
1965a).
3Parental
influence on schoolchildren's
legend repertoire
and
reporting style
is well documented in Halloween
leg-
ends a schoolteacher volunteered to collect from her
pupils
upon my request (Digh
1986, 127-72).
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