Book Review: S. Top (ed.) Op verhaal komen.
Burger, J.P.
Citation
Burger, J. P. (2009). Book Review: S. Top (ed.) Op verhaal komen. Fabula. Cultuur- Historisch Magazine, 50, 175-178. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/20042
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Fabula 50 (2009) H eft 1/2
© W alter de G ruyter Berlin · N ew Y ork
Davidsfonds, 2004. 271 p.; t. 2: W est-V laams sagenboek. 2005. 307 p.; t. 3:
Vlaams-Brabants sagenboek. 2005. 311 p.; t. 4: Oost-Vlaams sagenboek. 2006.
306 p.; t. 5: Sagen uit de provincie Antwerpen. 2007. 311 p.; t. 6: M oderne sagen en geruchten uit Vlaanderen, 2008. 263 p.
Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to legend research. The oldest hails from the humanities and comes at legend as folk literature, focusing on legends as stories, highlighting the art of storytellers, classifying tale types and motifs, and tracing the way stories have spread across the world. The second, more recent, approach is rooted in the social sciences and focuses on legend as a process: not folk literature, but – to quote the American legend scholar Bill Ellis – folk behaviour. Informed by anthropology and the sociology and social psychology of rumour, it typically produces case studies of the social functions of legend. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and the best efforts in the field today somehow merge these complementary perspectives.
The recently completed series of volumes on Flemish legends edited by Stefaan Top, Op verhaal komen, exemplifies the first approach to legend studies. A six volume set of legend anthologies, complemented by a giant database available to Internet users (www.volksverhalenbank.be), it aims to serve both an academic and a general audience. Op verhaal komen stands as a landmark contribution to Flemish legend studies, even though it could have benefited from insights yielded by more recent methods and theories.
The anthologies can be said to be more than half a century in the making. The origins of the project go all the way back to 1942, when Alice de Haes, mastering in folklore at the Catholic University of Leuven, set out to collect legends in the province of Antwerp. Hers was the first of over a hundred master’s theses (and an additional five from Ghent University), written between 1943 and 2007. Jointly, these student collectors amassed some 70,000 legend texts, the majority of which lingered in the archives until recently. Op verhaal komen anthologises 2,100 texts, but the entire collection is meant to be published on the web eventually.
Op verhaal komen seeks to represent Flemish legendry from 1875 to 1950 (t. 6, p. 22). Although collecting started in the 1940s and most interviews were con- ducted between 1950 and 2003, most informants were in their sixties or older.
The first volume for example, on the legends of the province of Limburg, contains 340 items. Of the informants whose age is stated, no more than six are under sixty. Volume 5 even features a centenarian storyteller. Given the fact that many of these stories hark back to the tellers’ youth, the editor reads these texts as representing legends told during the last years of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.
The first five volumes each contain traditional legends of one of the Flemish provinces: Limburg, W est F landers, Flemish B rabant, East Flanders, and Antwerp. The legends in the last volume, dealing with contemporary legend, are different: these were collected from high school age children during the last two decades. This volume partly makes up for the age bias, yet methodologically it is
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a step back compared to the earlier volumes: the contemporary legend texts were not elicited by means of interviews, but by means of a survey, asking high school students to write down the stories they knew. This method produces legend digests without context. Consequently, very few are as engaging as the best-told traditional legends in this collection.
The volumes can be read separately. Each one contains an introduction that sets out the history of legend research in the province it covers. Read in succession, these introductions provide an overview of legend research in Flanders from the nineteenth century to the present day.
The main part of each volume consists of the legends themselves, presented according to the categories of Sinninghe’s 1943 legend catalogue, e. g. spirits of earth, air, fire and water, revenants, witches, wizards, haunted places, and buried treasure. M any faces will be familiar to Flemish readers, such as the goat-riding Bokkenrijder brigands, Baekelandt’s highwaymen, or those malicious scourges of nightly travellers, chain-rattling water demon Kludde and Lange W apper, a shape-shifting trickster. The atmosphere is thick with black magic: a significant number of texts (comprising almost one third of the traditional legends) are about the harm that witches do. M any of these are memorates, personal recollections of the way the tellers and their relatives have been afflicted by magic spells. Priests often appear as powerful magicians in their own right, sweating profusely (‘drops of sweat the size of peas were hanging from each of his hairs’) as they cast out evil. M any legends in these collections are well-told, polished stories.
The texts were edited for ease of reading: phonological idiosyncrasies were ironed out, but many of the grammatical and idiomatic quirks of the original dialect versions were kept intact, so the result still contains a flavour of the original. Since many legends, particularly those featuring accusations of witch- craft, could be considered slanderous, informants’ surnames have been reduced to initials, e. g. ‘Gerard H., farmer, 84 years, Halle-Booienhoven’. Persons who could be recognised by their profession (e. g. the village blacksmith or the mayor) are identified as ‘self-employed’ or ‘official’. Full particulars are still available to researchers though, as are the original dialect versions, in a password-protected section of the database, accessible from computers within the domain of the University of Leuven.
The legend texts are followed by a commentary that draws attention to rhetorical and stylistic features, and uses the legends as a source of information on popular attitudes towards disease, death, the afterlife, and other themes. Each volume concludes with a bibliography and extensive subject and name indexes, that enhance the series’ value as a research tool.
Considering the richness of these offerings, it feels ungenerous to bring up some goals these volumes do not accomplish – probably do not even want to accomplish. Op verhaal komen is meant to be a legend anthology, and in this regard it is an overall success. Still, the project raises issues regarding its relation to current legend scholarship that need to be addressed in this review.
Editing more than half a century’s worth of unpublished legends could have been an occasion to re-examine the genre of legend. W hat is it? How does it relate
to other genres? W hat kind of historical information does it contain? W hat, if any, are the differences between traditional and contemporary legend? Op verhaal komen does visit these contentious areas in legend research, but it could have done so more thoroughly.
To start with the last question: in order to explain the difference between traditional and contemporary legends, T op quotes Gillian Bennett’s 2005 collection of essays on contemporary legend, Bodies: “(traditional) legend implies a long-lived story about the past told by elderly people living in remote rural places, told as true but inherently fictional”. This contrasts with “contemporary legends, [they] reflect the fears and anxieties of a particular age or are cautionary tales warning of modern dangers” (t. 6, 23). These quotes, however, do not reflect Bennett’s opinion, but T op’s. W hat Bennett actually wrote is the very opposite:
“For a traditional folklorist the term legend implies a long-lived story about the past told by elderly people living in remote rural places, told as true but inherently fictional. From the 1960s onward, these assumptions were challenged by a new breed of researchers [… ]” (Bennett 2005, ix [emphasis added]). In the original version of the second quote Bennett states her opinion in even stronger terms: “I do not concur with the common view that these stories are also contemporary in the sense that they reflect the fears and anxieties of a particular age or are cautionary tales warning of modern dangers. I do not think that this contention has yet been satisfactorily proved.” (2005, xiii [emphasis added]). The reason for dwelling on this slip of the pen is that it goes to the heart of my reservations about this project: Op verhaal komen reproduces a number of taken-for-granted charac- teristics of legend that have been challenged during the last decades. It downplays the dialogic nature of the genre, focuses on belief and generally ignores the role of disbelief, and considers legend as essentially untrue, the product of mis- perception and the survival of ‘primitive’ belief.
M any modern researchers view the genre of legend as at heart dialogic: not a statement of belief, but rather ‘a debate about belief’ (Linda Dégh). This debate may be reflected in the way a legend teller pre-empts sceptical arguments of an imagined opponent (‘I’m positive that it was a ghost. The moon was shining brightly and I was completely sober.’). Or, quite commonly, legends emerge in conversation and become the topic of an actual discussion. Because of this, versions that omit any mention of the way the legends were elicited, distort their very nature.
To his credit, Top states that versions reflecting the interaction between researcher and informant are to be preferred to reconstructed monologues (e. g., t. 3, 262 f.) and in fact, dialogic versions do occur, especially in more recently collected material. The majority, however, are nicely rounded stories, which make for good reading, but only show one side of legend: stressing its literary quality, they lack the emergent, urgent quality of legend that is emphasised by researchers working in the social science tradition.
This latter quality is downplayed as well by the collectors’ preference for legends told by believers. Although disbelievers are, as Dégh has argued, as much part of the legend process as believers, disbelief is underrepresented in these
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volumes. H ence the false feeling of timelessness conveyed by these stories:
reading the witchcraft legends, one comes away with the impression that during the period covered by the collectors scepticism was almost non-existent. This begs the question when and how witchcraft beliefs could ever lose their per- suasive power. Interviewing disbelievers would have produced a more accurate picture.
Disbelief features largely in the volumes’ introductions and commentaries. Top views legend as essentially untrue and on several occasions explains away fears of monsters lurking in the dark as the product of the alcohol-fuelled imagination of revelers loosing their way when returning home after a night at the village fair (e. g., t. 2, 256 f.; t. 3, 263, 266). These fears are also explained as survivals of primitive belief (e. g., t. 4, 242; t. 5, 258). Given the fact that we know little about the thoughts of ‘primitive man’, it is hazardous to posit a continuity between ancient earth spirits and twentieth century stories about underground-dwelling gnomes, or between fire spirits and will-o’-the-wisps.
The legends in these books are stories of fright and misfortune. Together, they make up ‘the world of legend’. This dark domain, often invoked in the intro- ductions and commentaries, is like an unknown continent, to be explored by the folklorist. This familiar rhetoric, however, obscures the fact that this world is a construct of the folklorist’s making. Its out-there-ness is not a given, but a social construction.
The darkness of the world of legend as it is depicted in Op verhaal komen is partly an accident of language and tradition: uplifting miracle stories and saints’
legends (Dutch: legenden) are excluded from this collection of legends (Dutch:
sagen). Including them would have changed the character of the world of legend.
So would the inclusion of stories that go beyond the quaint and the marginal and connect to major upheavals in Flemish history. The First W orld W ar serves as a backdrop in a small number of legends, but otherwise the two W orld W ars are conspicuous by their absence, as are profound collective experiences such as the Dutroux murders during the nineties, with their attendant allegations of Satanism and elite conspiracies. Legend scholarship nowadays encompasses the peripheral and the mainstream, the inconsequential and the politically relevant, stories recreated orally and by a variety of media.
In spite of these reservations, students of legend will find these publications a welcome addition to their scholarly resources. They have much to commend them to the general reader as well, who will rejoice in meeting the devils, will-o’-the- wisps, burning shepherds, freemasons and revenants that used to scare his forebears.
Leiden Peter Burger
