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Online Talk: Sally the Seal, Roboto, and Other Traditional Helper Figures in Family Life

  • 04/11/2025
  • 19:00-20:30
  • online talk

Photo: Sally the Seal (by Claire)

Sally the Seal, Roboto, and Other Traditional Helper Figures in Family Life

A Folklore Society online talk

by

Simon Gall

Tuesday 4 November, 19:00 GMT

Folklorists and ethnologists have long written about how parents borrow, adapt, and use traditional figures to engage their children in various ways. John Widdowson, for example, wrote about the great plethora of threatening figures that parents deploy to control their children’s behaviour, while Timo Heimerdinger has written more about more gentle family engagements with the German Dummy Fairy, or Schullerfee, to navigate troublesome child health discourses around the removal of the pacifier.

Others, such as Rosemary Wells, have written about the Tooth Fairy and the symbolic role it plays in the rite of passage from child towards adult. What these kinds of folkloric studies have in common is their focus on largely shared, even universal, traditional figures. There has been little focus on the unique traditional helper figures that families themselves invent and deploy to deal with the many challenges inherent in raising children. This talk will highlight examples of such invented traditional figures from my own research exploring how they can emerge, the various forms they can take, the relevant contexts, and the creative ways in which they can be deployed.

Simon Gall is an ethnologist from the North-East of Scotland. He has research interests in family creativity and folklore, the public uses of North-East Scots language, and Public Folklore. He holds a MLitt in Ethnology and Folklore from the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen.

Tickets £6.00 (£4.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code: log in to https://folklore-society.com/members-only to get the Promo Code) from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sally-the-seal-roboto-and-other-traditional-helper-figures-in-family-life-tickets-1397207407969?

Photo: Sally the Seal (by Claire)