Water in Legend and Tradition: the 18th Legendary Weekend of The Folklore Society Saturday 31 August and Sunday 1 September 2024 St Peter’s by the Waterfront, College Street, Ipswich IP4 1BF, UK CALL for PAPERS, Presentations or Performances: Deadline 1 July Cry me a river! The tears of the Virgin would fill a bottomless pool, down...
Estella Canziani Post-graduate Bursary for Research 2024
We are pleased to announce that bursaries for 2024 have been awarded to the following post-graduate students: Jessica Lloyd, for research on ‘The Randwick Wap: Folk Custom and Continuity’ Sophie Parkes-Nield, for research on ‘Thankstide: The Calendar Custom as Narrative Device in Contemporary Fiction’ Siobhan Scarlett O’Reilly, for research on ‘The Impact of Liminal Space...
An exhibition on folklorist John Francis Campbell is currently on at The National Library of Scotland. In 1859 Campbell and a team of helpers travelled across the western Highlands and Islands of Scotland, meeting storytellers and collecting Scottish Gaelic folktales. Until then, many of these folktales had been almost unknown beyond the Highlands. The exhibition...
UK Government Consultation on Intangible Cultural Heritage
The UK Government is proposing to ratify the UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) and, accordingly, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is inviting participation in a public consultation via an online survey and online roundtable discussions. The survey, which closes at the end of February 2024, can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/2003-unesco-convention-for-the-safeguarding-of-the-intangible-cultural-heritage/consultation-on-the-2003-unesco-convention-for-safeguarding-of-the-intangible-cultural-heritage...
Folklore Society President’s Prize 2023
We congratulate Xinrui Xie, winner of The Folklore Society President’s Prize 2023, for her essay ‘Shadowed Maternity: The Perpetuating Ambivalence Towards Motherhood in Ubume Narratives’
Dr Gillian Bennett (1939-2023)
We are very sad to learn of the death of Dr Gillian Bennett, former editor of our journal Folklore from 1994 to 2002, scholar of contemporary legends, supernatural beliefs, ghost narratives, history of folklore scholarship, women folklorists, and author of numerous publications, including her wonderful Traditions of Belief (1987). She will be much missed by all...
Tolkien letter to Katharine Briggs in Folklore Society Archives
University College London Special Collections have found a letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to Katharine Briggs in a box of her correspondence in our Folklore Society Archives. The other side of the correspondence, K.M. Briggs’ letters to Tolkien, are in the Tolkien family archive at The Bodleian Library. You can read more about the correspondence between...
Doc Rowe was in the news again on 5 November 2023, with an Observer article about his work: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/nov/05/cheese-rolling-straw-bears-and-weird-rituals-galore-one-mans-mission-to-record-all-of-british-folklore The article draws attention to the Crowdfunder to fund the digitisation of parts of Doc’s archive of the film and video recordings he has made of seasonal events in Britain over the past 60 years. The crowdfunder...