Believing the unbelievable: the myth of Russians 'with snow on their boots' in the United Kingdom, 1914

PublishedArticle“This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Cultural and Social History on1 May 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/ 10.2752/147800414X13802176314528.”In the opening months of the First World War, a rumour spread across the United Kingdom that Russian soldiers – identified by the ‘snow on their boots’ – had landed in Scotland en route to the Western Front. Despite being relegated to history’s footnotes as a comical but meaningless episode, this article takes the rumour seriously. Unconcerned with questions of ‘truth’ (the rumour was dismissed as fantastical by late October 1914), I will argue that the real value of this story is in what it reveals about British society at the outbreak of war. The rumour emerged as the British Expeditionary Force entered its first big test of the Great War – the battle of Mons – which would result in Germany’s first great victory and resulting in thousands of casualties. As such the rumour can be interpreted as a form of ‘secular apparition’ bringing consolation to many. It was one of the ways ordinary people made sense of their newly threatening world

Folklore in Antiquity

Folklore exists in all human groups, small and big. Since early modernity, scholars have provided various definitions of the phenomenon, but earlier texts may also reveal awareness and reflection on the specific character folklore. In this short article, we wish to explore and look into the various definitions and characterizations of folklore given by ancient writers from various times and cultures. We will try to draw a cultural map of awareness to the phenomenon of folklore in ancient Near-Eastern texts, Greco-Roman culture, the Hebrew Bible, Early Christianity and Rabbinic literature. The main questions we wish do deal with are where and if we can find explicit mention of folklore; which folk genres are dominant in ancient writings and what was the social context of ancient folklore? That is to say, whom those text integrated in social frameworks, enabling their users to gain power or to undermine existing cultural, theological and social structures

The Rhetoric of Intimacy - the Rhetoric of the Sacred

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Tales of the neighborhood: Jewish narrative dialogues in late antiquity

In this lively and intellectually engaging book, Galit Hasan-Rokem shows that religion is shaped not only in the halls of theological disputation and institutions of divine study, but also in ordinary events of everyday life. Common aspects of human relations offer a major source for the symbols of religious texts and rituals of late antique Judaism as well as its partner in narrative dialogues, early Christianity, Hasan-Rokem argues. Focusing on the "neighborhood" of the Galilee that is the birthplace of many major religious and cultural developments, this book brings to life the riddles, parables, and folktales passed down in Rabbinic stories from the first half of the first millennium of the Common Era

Ecotypes: Theory of the Lived and Narrated Experience

The ecotype, one of the most versatile and productive concepts in folklore studies, denotes a local variation in an international type as theorized by the geographical-historical school of folklore studies. C. W. von Sydow (1878–1952) developed the term in the 1930s for describing a process of cultural adaptation of tradition, emphasizing the relationship between tradition and its environment, based on a contextual, interactional, and functional view of its transmission and change. A. Dundes introduced the ecotype in his influential The Study of Folklore (1965); R. Abrahams used it systematically in his analysis of American urban ethnic traditions. L. Honko’s major theoretical follow-up of the ecotype (1981) systematized the process of ecotypification distinguishing “adaptation to the morphology of the environment,” “adaptation to the morphology of the tradition,” “functional adaptation,” occurring as new traditions introduced into a system attached themselves to “milieu dominants” and “tradition dominants.” Historically linked to emerging collective identities, especially national identities, the ecotype has characteristically been applied by scholars of small peoples striving to construct a separate national identity, such as S. Ó. Duilearga’s Irish, D. Noy’s Jewish, and E. Yassif’s Israeli ecotypes. Partly deconstructing the nationally constructed ecotypes, T. Alexander has worked with smaller ethnic and family ecotypes, and G. Hasan-Rokem has developed the interpretive aspects of the ecotype by discussing its potential to express relationships across groups in cultural “contact zones,” especially in historical, ancient contexts and in long duration. D. Hopkins has introduced the ecotype as the best possible tool to elicit the voices of the otherwise unheard parts of past populations, creating a bridge between cultural history and social history, pointing at further productive interdisciplinary potentials of the concept in folklore studies and beyond