Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/320

 302 Correspondence,

Lastly, I want to urge the importance of collecting folklore historically. Tough as popular tradition is, it yet undergoes modification from age to age. Every item of folklore, as we see it and know it now, has a "life-history" and a past — usually an unrecorded past. Only in European countries, where present-day evidence can be compared with historical records, can this process of modification now and then be studied, and some light thrown thereby upon that unrecorded past. Only in Europe, and not often there, can we learn what external events, what economic changes, what local personalities, have contributed to shape the folklore of the present day; and thence, reasoning by analogy, form some tentative hypothesis of the probable life-history of the folklore of uncivilised races. This to my mind is one of the strongest arguments for pressing forward with the collection of English folklore. The Society's series of County Folklore reprints forms a basis for the collector's inquiries. Present-day notes of {e.g.) the Plough Stots and Sword-dancers of Egton Bridge would be rendered doubly useful by comparing them with the perform- ance in 1817, as recorded in Young's History of Whitby (Gutch's County Folklore, p. 232), and endeavouring to trace the reasons of any changes. If the qualifications of the folklore collector and the local historian cannot be united in one person, let two join in collaboration. Especially should attention be paid to the local history of that most important of all historical centuries for our purpose, the seventeenth. I write strongly, because I feel strongly. History is far too much neglected among us. Even Mr. Addy's otherwise exhaustive monograph on the Castleton 29th of May festival, tells nothing that can throw light on popular opinion in Castleton in 1660 or 1662 : and the absence of an historical method of treatment of the ritual of Nemi is to me a regrettable flaw in the majestic fabric of the Goldeti Bough itself.

Charlotte S. Burne.

My experience in the collection of folklore is almost entirely confined to India.

In the first place, I venture to think that it is necessary to distinguish between the quest of folktales and of folklore pure and simple. By the latter I mean popular beliefs and superstitions Information on such matters comes usually, I think, not from