This article was downloaded by: [79.131.14.

142]
On: 18 June 2015, At: 13:54
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:
Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Folklore
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription
information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfol20

Linda Dgh (19182014)

Carl Lindahl
Published online: 20 Apr 2015.

Click for updates

To cite this article: Carl Lindahl (2015) Linda Dgh (19182014), Folklore, 126:1, 95-97, DOI:
10.1080/0015587X.2014.985927
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2014.985927

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content)
contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our
licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or
suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication
are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor &
Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently
verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any
losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial
or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use
can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Folklore 126 (April 2015): 9597

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2014.985927

IN MEMORIAM

Linda Degh (1918 2014)

Downloaded by [79.131.14.142] at 13:54 18 June 2015

Carl Lindahl
Linda Dgh, who reshaped the worlds understanding of mrchen and legend, died in
Bloomington, Indiana on 19 August 2014 at the age of ninety-six. After more than
seventy-ve years as a folklorist, she leaves a legacy of eighteen books, more than two
hundred articles, two extraordinary careers on two continents, and the charge to
innumerable students to continue seeking to discover the artists at the centre of folk
narrative, along with the aesthetic power and cultural urgency of their performances.
Born a doctors daughter in Budapest on 18 March 1918, she spent many childhood
nights listening as her elders read from Elek Benedeks 1890 classic, The World of
Hungarian Tales and Legends, and many summer days on her aunts estate where farm
workers shared stories with her. By the age of sixteen, she had acquired a pamphlet on
How to Collect Folklore and was poised for her rst career.
At the age of seventy-one, speaking at a reception in her honour at the Budapest
meeting of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research, Dgh told her audience
that she had chosen the folklorists path only after surrendering the dream of becoming
an actresswhich would go far to account for the care that her writings devote to the
verbal dynamism of folk narrators and the theatrics of village storytelling. Among
folklorists, her model and inspiration was Gyula Ortutay (1910 78), the director of her
dissertation, noted both as a rigorous academic and a radio personality who shared
Dghs appreciation for the dramatic power of storytelling events.
As Dgh was preparing for her doctoral examinations, she asked Ortutay what she
needed to know. He answered, You must know everything. She seems to have taken him
literally, as in subsequent years she sought to know, and tell, all that she could discover
about the wonder tale. Her rst quarter-century of scholarship centred on the exhaustive
recording and research of mrchen, mrchen-tellers, and mrchen-telling communities.
Yet she never lost sight of the main gure, the performer. Her dissertation and rst two
books focused on one narrator, one repertoire, one cultural context: the life and art of
Peter Pandur. She then turned to her most famous narrator, the Szkely master
Zsuzsanna Palk, star of Folktales and Society (1969). This book, the gold-standard study of
a mrchen-telling community, does indeed seem to take on everything: an account of the
intensive post-World War II survey of Szkely peasant communities undertaken by
Hungarian folklorists, a pocket ethnography of Mrs Palks Kakasd community, a history
of folktale scholarship, and close considerations of village storytelling and the lives and
repertoires of the major narrators. Still, Dgh structures the book around one
remarkable womans performances. Only one element is missing: the tales themselvesa
publishers decision that vexed Dgh for more than twenty-ve years, until she nally
found a publisher who would commit to printing translations of thirty-ve of Mrs
Palks most remarkable performances. Hungarian Folktales: The Art of Zsuzsanna Palk
q 2015 The Folklore Society

Downloaded by [79.131.14.142] at 13:54 18 June 2015

96

In Memoriam

(1995) is arguably the nest record of one mrchen narrators tales circulating in English
today.
In 1964, Dgh accepted a professorship in folklore at Indiana University, Bloomington
and began the second phase of her career, almost instantaneously shifting her research
focus from mrchen to legend, and from the Old World to the New. As she arrived in the
United States, Richard M. Dorson, director of Indianas Folklore Institute, and other
Americanists were strongly emphasizing the non-supernatural qualities of American
legendry, which Dorson saw as fundamentally different from Old World Sagen. Americas
legendry, like American life, was presumably dominated by rational, pragmatic, real
world perspectives. But as soon as Dgh marshalled her students to join her in eldwork
and type-studies of legends circulating in the Bloomington area, she discovered,
everywhere, the presence of the non-rational, the supernatural, the believer, belief.
In 1968 Dgh became the founding editor of the journal Indiana Folklore, which quickly
grew into the New Worlds principal organ for innovative legend scholarship. She and
her students ooded the rst volumes with studies demonstrating the vitality, intensity,
and protean form of contemporary legend-telling.
For the ensuing forty-six years Dgh would continue to try to capture the living
nature of legend: under her scrutiny it appeared ever-new, a half-told story straining for
completion, assuming various forms, unfolding more as a debate than as a narrative,
created in the dialectic tension between belief and disbelief. A respectable summary of
Dghs legend scholarship would consume a book in itself; here I conne myself to the
two pieces that I consider the most important ever written on legend. The rst, The
Dialectics of the Legend (1973), is the strongest articulation of her concept of legend as
debate; it utterly undoes the older, simplistic characterization of the genre as a narrative
believed to be true. The second article, Does the Word Dog Bite? (1983), nally gave us
the words for what we had so long felt about legend: the what if? quality that makes it
potentially true. Through ostension, criminals imitate storied crimes to render rumours
real, tricksters stage hoaxes that bring stories to life, and legend-trippers cast
themselves in the roles of legend victims as they revisit haunted sites. Both articles
expose the dramatic principles at work in the creation of legend and reveal its
performance as an imitation of life always lurking on the threshold of becoming as real
as life itself.
In both of these masterpieces, Dgh shared authorship with her husband of twentyeight years, Andrew Vzsonyi (1906 86). Surviving friends and students attest to the
mutual devotion that marked the couples shared life and work. After Vzsonyis death,
Dgh continued to publish prolically on legend, writing numerous articles and putting
together two books that now serve as summae of her lifes work with the genre. Narratives
in Society (1995) brings together most of the major articles (some signicantly revised)
that she produced in her rst seventy-seven years, and the monumental Legend and Belief
(2001) stands as her sole book dedicated exclusively to legend.
Her devotion to folklore never agged. Well into her tenth decade, both at
conferences and in print, she remained a major presence. She never stopped being either
relevant or dramatic. At the age of ninety-ve, attending her last major conference, the
2013 meeting of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, she
pronounced that legend and belief would always remain at the heart of human
experience. We are all believers, she said, because we are all afraid of death.

In Memoriam

97

Downloaded by [79.131.14.142] at 13:54 18 June 2015

For all of the drama that attended her life, Linda Dgh met her own death with an air
of uncharacteristic calm and serenity. In August 2014 her devoted friend Libby Tucker
wrote to a number of Lindas students to let us know that there was little time left for us
to tell her goodbye. When I telephoned, Linda sounded at least as happy as at any time
that I could remember. She had been asleep. I dreamed that I died, she told me, and it is
good to wake up. She spoke with delight of her dog, her church, her friends, and folklore.
She sounded so vital thatin spite of her great age and the doctors (ultimately accurate)
predictionsI half believed that we would see each other again. But three days later, she
was gone, having lived and died whole.
If, as she told us in 1989, Linda Dgh failed to become an actress, there is no doubt that
she became the dramaturge who staged the transformation of legend from frozen text to
life-and-death drama, through a career of sustained creativity that has inuenced every
folklorist who has followed her.
Note
All of the above quotations are from oral communications made by Linda Dgh directly to
Carl Lindahl or at public presentations attended by him. More on her life and work can be
found in two published tributes: Elizabeth Tucker and Janet L. Langlois, Introduction:
Emerging Legends in Contemporary Society, Journal of American Folklore 118 (2005): 12940
(which is the source of the information in the second paragraph above); and Folklore on
Two Continents: Essays in Honor of Linda Dgh, ed. Nikolai Burlakoff and Carl Lindahl
(Bloomington: Trickster Press, 1980). Full titles and citations of the Dgh works mentioned
here can be found in her Narratives in Society: A Performer-Centered Study of Narration (Helsinki:
Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1995) and Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Perhaps the one article that speaks most
directly to her dramatic concept of storytelling is The Artist at the Center: New Tasks for
Studying Folktales in Our Time, in Folklore in 2000, ed. Ilona Nagy and Kincs Vereblyi
(Budapest: Etvs Lornd, 2000).
Biographical Note
Carl Lindahl is Martha Gano Houstoun Professor of English at the University of Houston, Texas, USA.