Johnny Appleseed has entered the entertainment lexicon with children’s stories, a movie, a Broadway play, and numerous cartoons, and festivals are held all over the country in his honor. Appleseed was a real living legend, probably far more normal and less eccentric than some elements of his legend suggest, and no doubt as time goes on, his story will be embellished even further. Yet at its core, is historical fact.
American Folk Legends By S.E. Schlosser
My double-great-grandfather, Richard Johnson, was a Pennsylvania Dutch hex doctor. Yes, you read that right. A real-life hex doctor who achieved quite a bit of fame in eastern Pennsylvania. People were carried into his office with badly broken legs and walked out again on their own two feet, completely healed. Legends are still told about the man more than a hundred years later. In fact, I met a Pennsylvania couple while hiking in Yellowstone last summer (2012) who knew all the Richard Johnson legends, which are still being told in their hometown.
When I was researching my book Spooky Pennsylvania, I interviewed a senior citizen who knew Richard Johnson. As a young child, she went with her mother to consult the hex doctor when conventional medicine failed to heal her fever-stricken infant sister. The senior citizen’s body shook as she recalled how Richard Johnson prayed and chanted over the infant, smoke rising from his gloved hands, which clutched red-hot coals designed to draw the fever out of the tiny baby. The terrifying scene was still branded on her memory 70 years later, because she thought the baby would die. But the infant was fever-free by the time the family reached home, and today is a grandmother herself.
By definition, a legend is a traditional tale that is passed down from earlier times and believed to have its basis in historical fact. An example would be George Washington, who is the hero of many legends. My favorite is a tale collected for Spooky New Jersey in which the general’s life was save by the ghost of a little girl during the first winter of the Revolutionary War, when Washington was headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey. Another George Washington legend is told at Gettysburg, where the general’s ghost appeared to the stricken soldiers on Little Round Top and led the Northern charge against the Confederate Army, which threatened to destroy the unity of his beloved country.
Reaching back to Colonial times, the legend of Ocean-Born Mary (collected for Spooky New England) arose from a factual incident in which the dashing pirate Don Pedro spared the life of an Irish immigrant woman who had just given birth to a baby girl. The legend claims that the pirate kept track of the beautiful infant as she grew and came courting when Mary reached adulthood. Ocean-Born Mary’s ghost is still said to haunt the New Hampshire house, which she shared with her reformed pirate.
A pre-Colonial legend that fascinates me was passed through many generations of a Native American tribe living in Washington State. In the tale, recounted in Spooky Washington, a very special man comes to live with the tribe for a year before “perishing” and being laid to rest on a rock above the tribal grounds. Eyewitnesses described a bright ship descending from the heavens and glowing figures retrieving the “body” from the rock. An ancient UFO legend?
I will close with a British Columbia myth from Spooky Canada, defined as a myth because it is an ancient story that deals with one of the great heroes of the Kaska First Nations. In this story, a monster called a “tix” attacks the camp of a wandering warrior and his wife. The warrior is killed by the monster, but the wife escapes with her baby and is chased across a frozen lake by the tix. The hero, Bladder-Head Boy, lives on an island with his people and destroys the stalking monster before it can harm anyone else. Why—you may ask—am I so fascinated by this particular story? Because, my friends, a “tix” is a wooly mammoth!
S.E. Schlosser is the author of the 26-book “Spooky Series” (Globe Pequot Press) and the publisher of the world-renowned, award-winning folklore site Americanfolklore.net.
Folklore and Folk Tales
Like legends, folklore often involves actual true historical events, or true personal experiences, but in general is much more fictional and designed to convey a specific message about a community of “folks” and how they view the world. The word folk refers to a group of people who share a common factor, such as familial connections, the same community, an occupation, religious beliefs, or language and culture. Folklore originated as a means of communication and expression for these groups, and according to Alan Dundes, the man most accredited with making folklore a valid academic field of study, in Interpreting Folklore, “No group of people, however remote or however simple their technology, has ever been discovered which does not employ some form of folklore. Because of this and because the same tales and proverbs may be known to both, folklore is a bridge between literate and non-literate societies.”
Dundes, who was a folklorist at University of California, Berkeley, and the author of more than a dozen books, is often credited as the person behind making sure that folklore was considered a valid academic discipline. He himself received a PhD in folklore from Indiana University, and then went on to teach at both the University of Kansas and then at Berkeley, where he taught for 42 years until his death in 2005. His books covered almost every aspect of folklore, fables, oral and written literature, and even folkloric humor, and include Interpreting Folklore; Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics; When You’re Up to Your Ass in Alligators: More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire; and Fables of the Ancients?: Folklore in the Qur’an, among other academic and popular titles.
Dundes understood that the most common method of transmission for folklore was oral and that this oral tradition, even if it was eventually written down later, was the backbone of true folk tales and the main criteria by which they were judged. Something purely written down was not necessarily true folklore, but based upon the original oral story. Folklore could include any oral form, including epic poems, myths, legends, fables, riddles, songs, jokes, nursery rhymes, toasts, insults, fairytales, and prayers, and even some non-verbal forms, like games, quilting, festivals and rituals, and symbols, could be considered in the realm of folklore.
We might be a little more accepting today of written forms of folklore, especially with the Internet as the most popular form of information transmission, and therefore a mainly written one, but true folklore has an artistic, structured form, despite ongoing alterations and additions made as the story is told and handed down.
The functions of folklore in culture and community are to validate that culture or community and to lay down a foundation of moral codes and values, but also to give a sense of group/communal existence to those sharing in the lore of their region. These tales of both fact and fantasy may also serve to give people a sense of largesse, or grandeur to boost the collective ego, although in more cases it seems folk tales serve as a communal glue. We can all think of modern folk tales, as with urban legends, that might have arisen right out our childhood communities, that we carry with us the rest of our lives and even pass on to our offspring.
Sometimes folklore and legend blend into a form of story-telling that depicts an extraordinary situation, person, or event as if it were actual historical fact. These stories tend to be oral in origin, and though the details of the setting and the times may be very accurate, there may be a bit of added on fabrication. Think of the most popular folk legends in America, with our stories of Paul Bunyan and Davy Crockett.
Folk legends have been categorized into four groups according to American folklorist Dr. Jan Harold Brunvand:
1. Religious legends of miracles, prayers answered, iconic appearances of religious figures, revelations.
2. Supernatural legends of ghosts, vampires, zombies, werewolves, and fairies, etc.
3. Personal legends of bigger-than-life real people like Billy the Kid and Johnny Appleseed.
4. Local legends that focus on a specific geographic area and history.
Even bad guys can achieve folk-legend status, as told in the tales of Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Buffalo Bill
, among others. Interestingly, most folk legends focus on the lives of men; few women seem fit to achieve that status of importance, although Annie Oakley and Lizzie Borden come to mind!
What the Old Wives Say
Never swallow your chewing gum! It takes seven years to pass through your system. Oh, and do not, under any circumstances, masturbate or you will go blind and grow hair on your palms! And for God’s sake, stop making that awful face or your face will permanently stay that way! Now get away from the TV set because if you sit too close, your eyesight will fail.
Really, you can try any of these and chances are you’ll be just fine. Thanks to a form of urban legend called “old wives’ tales,” we get all kinds of moral warnings that have absolutely no basis in fact. These tales originated as a part of the oral tradition of story-telling and were often used by mothers to keep their children in line. Though they seem like nasty warnings, the original intent may have been simple wisdom women hoped to pass on to make the lives of their children easier and fraught with fewer problems to contend with. (Who wants to grow up with hairy palms?)
Today, we have Websites like Google and Snopes and TV shows like Mythbusters to disprove these claims, but we most likely are creating some falsities of our own to pass on to future generations. Now stop lying, or you’ll get white spots on your fingernails. And put down that chocolate. Don’t you know it leads to acne?
When the Bough Breaks
One of the greatest folklorists in the history of the field is Sir James Frazer, the author of the seminal collection of folklore and mythology, focusing on nature rites, rituals, and celebrations, The Golden Bough. Time called this book one of the most influential books of the 20th century, and even today it is the standard by which we examine the way nature was once feared, worshipped, and revered, and how magic was present in the everyday lives of our primitive ancestors. Those ancestors, Frazer documents, emerged from a more “primitive” way of looking at the natural world around them into a more sophisticated culture through sympathetic magic and spiritual values that were, at one time, based upon more crude and even bloody and violent codes of behavior.
The cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth is the backbone of Frazer’s work, which goes into painstaking detail of the legends, myths, and rituals of cultures across the globe who were attempting to reconcile the natural world around them with their growing need for morals, ethics, and a connectedness to the larger cycle they were enmeshed in. Frazer, a Scottish anthropologist who lived between 1854 and 1941, first published two volumes of the Bough (named after a painting by J.M.W. Turner of a sacred tree in a sacred grove) in 1890, three more in 1900, and additional volumes in 1906–1915, and new essays have been added to more current volumes since. It’s a heavy, hefty book, filled with comparative studies in myth, religion, ritual, and belief that focus on such primitive, even pagan, rites and rituals involving fertility, death, resurrection, human sacrifice, and the dying God. These themes, among others, were prevalent among what may have been fertility cults revolving around a “sacred king,” and even have some commonalities, as discussed earlier, with the myths of Mithras, Christ, Dionysus, and even King Arthur. In fact, upon the book’s release in England, a scandal erupted at the inclusion of the Christ story of Jesus’ resurrection and similar “resurrection-themed” stories of a sacred deity, and the pagan origins of many of them, something the Christian church wasn’t too keen on exposing!
Frazer’s belief was that humanity progressed through several modes of thought and belief, from magical to religious to scientific. The more modern the times, the more knowledge available, thus taking what was once purely magical into the realms of actual scientific understanding as nature reveals more truths. Though the book was in a sense a tome about religion and the history of religious belief from primitive nature-based rites to the more theological elements of modern times, we could get an amazing glimpse into our historical past and how our ancestors once viewed the natural world of plants, animals, the sun, cycles of growing and harvest, and our own place in that world, which at the time appeared as magical. In fact, the Bough might be considered a manual of the history of sympathetic magic and ritual designed to mimic on earth the activities of the heavens, thus the “as above, so below” feel of many primitive nature rites. Frazer states that this “like produces like” also suggests that effects resemble their cause. He considers sympathetic magic one of two branches of magic our ancestors believed in when dealing with nature (think cave art and drawings of men successfully hunting prey for food). The other branch was contagious magic, which proceeds upon the notion that things which have once been conjoined must remain afterward, even when quite disserved from each other, in such a sympathetic relation that whatever is done to one must similarly affect the other.
Let us stop here for a moment and allow the shivers that just went up our collective spines to subside—shivers we felt because of this simple definition, and how much it mirrors the definition of quantum entanglement, where two particles that have once been in any form of contact, even when separated over vast distances, continue to influence and affect the other’s behavior or “spin.”
As above, so below.
Contagious Magic
Contagious magic also suggested, as many primitive and pagan rites show, that something that once was a part of the human body, say a fingernail or some hair, could be used to work that person’s will even after being removed from the body. Think about that next time you cut off your long and scraggly toenails and flush them down the toilet. In the times of superstitious primitive peoples just learning the laws of nature, those fingernails could be powerful objects that could help you work some hoodoo out in the world, if you knew how to master the forces behind them. Think forward a bit to the Biblical tale of Samson and Delilah, and the importance of Samson’s long hair. Without it, he was powerless, as Delilah the temptress proved when she chopped off his locks while he was out cold—a perfect example of how a motif can pass down from one cultural point in history to another, and even into the halls of religion and even science.
These branches of magic played a large part in the stories Frazer examined, and again we are reminded that today’s science was once magical fantasy. We now know our DNA can be left behind at a scene of a crime, or that our own blood can be taken out and stored offsite in case we need it during surgery later in life.
The idea of deifying or worshipping the sun, moon, trees, crops, the sex act, eggs, bunnies, corn, and other purely natural things seems so silly to us now, but to those from whom we’ve descended, there was a deep understanding of the importance of those very things, even if they way they expressed that importance is now considered naïve, crude, and misinformed!
With the industrial age, many societies and cultures no longer needed folklore as a way to create their own regional identities, especially the poor, who often felt invisible and ignored. Commoners, as in the lower classes, moved from place to place seeking jobs and the folk tales of their youth that were left behind as they progressed. But it never really killed folklore; it just changed it, as the populace itself changed. The core stories have held on rather well throughout the course of history, even into today’s modern age of technology, proving that everyone loves a good story, especially if it holds within it some fact or truth.
An excerpt from the First Annual Report of the Council of the English Folklore Society, published in The Folk Lore Record in 1879, makes a great point:
Folk-lore may be said to include all the “culture” of the people which has not been worked into the official religion and history, but which is and has always been of self growth. It represents itself in civilized history by strange and uncouth customs; superstitious associations with animals, birds, flowers, trees and topographical objects, and with the events of human life; the belief in witchcraft, fairies, and spirits; the traditional ballads and proverbial sayings incident to particular localities; the retention of popular names for hills, streams, caverns, springs, tum
uli, fountains, fields, trees, etc., and all such out-of-the-way lore.
It is that “out-of-the-way” lore that still captures our imaginations today.
Fairytales
Fairytales, more than any other type of written story-telling, combine imaginative and fantastical elements with archetypal characters and yet also convey important messages about life, its ups and downs and ins and out, to the conscious and subconscious mind. Most fairytales follow the journey of a hero or heroine who is isolated from society, whether by choice or by force, and must overcome distinct challenges and struggles, even hardships beyond measure, to come out a “happily even after” winner. Fairytale characters and motifs especially relate to younger readers and to children, because many of the characters themselves are prepubescent or preadolescent.
By definition, the term fairytale is a short story (oral or written) filled with fantastical and even folkloric elements such as fairies, goblins, giants, dwarves, talking trees and animals, elves, and other creatures widely accepted as imaginative and enchanting. Magic plays a role in fairytales, both good magic and evil, and they may have a happy ending, such as those fairytale romances many modern-day Hollywood movies are based upon, where the prince rescues the damsel in distress and all is well. Fairies are not always required, although they often make an appearance, and the term fairytale, which may have originated with 17th-century French writer Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, also known as Baroness d’Aulnoy or Countess d’Aulnoy, who called her own stories contes de fees (fairytales), implies more of a particular genre than exact content.
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