folklore i'd forgotten to imagine before: the lost folk by lally macbeth

folk material culture, things you can hold in your hands, and all the worlds that exist around the literature

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When Faber contacted me on TikTok to ask if I’d like to receive a proof copy of a new book they had coming out, I knew I wanted to say yes before my eyes had got to the part of the message where they told me what the book was. I knew I’d take whatever it was and twist my reading knowledge in absolutely any direction I had to in order to take the book and find something interesting and relevant to say about it. I was willing to read anything.

So imagine my joy when I discovered that The Lost Folk: A Journey from the Forgotten Past to the Emerging Future of Folk was a book I would absolutely have spent money on, on purpose, without prompting.

And imagine my further joy when the book was really really good.

I could have done a quick TikTok post about the fact it’s a cool book people should read (and it is a cool book people should read, you should read it). But the more I read it, the more I found it was prompting bigger and more wordy reactions that I didn’t think a short-form video could hold. The really cool thing about this book is the way it uncannily complemented all the knowledge I already had about folk cultures like a photo negative. I think there will be a lot of people, and probably a lot of people reading my essays on here, in the same position.

When you do English degrees, medieval literature degrees, projects on medieval aesthetics, survivals, and revivals, it’s easy to forget about physical items and things people did and do in the real world. I feel quite stupid now, but it made me raise my eyebrows in surprise when I realised in the first few pages of this book that the folk ‘customs’ I’d seen on the back cover weren’t going to be literature or music or art I could approximate to literature in my brain. My god, I thought, folk culture is also stuff.

This is a fault of mine that’s been noted before. I hope I’m not the only person afflicted by this. I love intellectual history, reception studies, tracing the history of retellings and reimaginings in literature. I love doing it with folklore and all the types of refraction and recreation that happens when people put folkloric ideas in a new soup to stir it up again. One of my current PhD reading obsessions is how the romanticized idea of the Druid took form across Britain and pitched up in mirror-image form in The Wicker Man. I’m fascinated by how the Scottish borders Tam Lin lyric became a Fairport Convention song and then an Alan Garner book and then A Court of Thorns and Roses and now everyone has a coworker who wants to tell them about thirst edits of a character from a medievalist ballad. But I always look a bit blank and baffled when people suggest my literature obsessions could have anything to do with stuff that exists. My grad school work on the literary presentation of soil and fear always makes people say, ‘oh so you’re reading about agriculture and how to grow stuff?’ and I go, ‘absolutely not, I don’t do real soil, only made-up soil’. My masters dissertation was supervised by an archaeologist who was very patient with me every time I forgot that earth was not just symbolic, it was also real.

So The Lost Folk took all the bits of folk studies I wasn’t good at and made a stirring argument in favour of keeping objects, clothes, toys, stuff at the front of your mind. It did the best thing a book on a topic I already think about a lot could do — it made my world bigger. I don’t see myself trawling second hand markets for old horse brasses myself. I’m far too airy-fairy for that. But I feel cleverer now. I feel like I can see the folk real world in clearer focus, the world that holds and contains the writing and telling of folklore. It’s like a greyed out video game map taking on more detail as you level up.

One of Macbeth’s central arguments, which I’m entirely on board with, is that folk culture in all its forms is basically and essentially about people. Folk is what emerges when people live together in a community. It changes as the community changes. It links people to each other and the world around them, linked to the profoundly human acts of marking the changing seasons and plotting out your collective place in the world. So when I write about medieval stories and the ways they change shape in the retelling, and how earth becomes horror when it’s translated and retold, I probably should have the people who held these stories in their hands more in mind.

The part of The Lost Folk that blew my mind most comprehensively was the chapter on objects. It’s probably clear by now that it’s the one that challenged me the most. I’ve never thought so deeply about the meaning accrued over generations of grubby fingerprints and careful or careless use. I started the chapter on objects thinking, ‘this one must be about stuff in museums then’ and was greeted with stranger, more fluid and hard-to-track-and-preserve objects and places. I’ve never had a thought in my life before about church kneelers, and now my mind is full of the ways hand-stitched cushions for kneeling on church floors can represent Candlemas or a solar eclipse and the way one craftsperson in one Cornish town perceived it. I’ve never thought to go looking for statues dedicated to Pan at the sides of roads in Gloucestershire. Perhaps I should. (Road trip, anyone?)

Even my beloved airy-fairy separate-from-the-physical world stories and lyrics are things that have travelled from past to present in the form of objects. Our entire knowledge of medieval literature from the British Isles comes from the physical texts that managed to make it to the present day, passed from person to person, stamped with names, read out loud, stained by spilled drinks and greasy fingers. Literature always has material culture all over it, and literature scholars make fools of ourselves when we imagine church kneelers and pub signs have no legendary ideas in them, and literature has no fingerprints all over it.

I learned a lot from the book but I also appreciated it as a call to arms to think of folk culture as something that deserves considering and remembering — new and old folk culture, ‘perfectly preserved’ and new syncretic folk culture. It’s not something that should or can be trapped in amber, but we should pay attention to it as it changes.

The Lost Folk: A Journey from the Forgotten Past to the Emerging Future of Folk comes out in a few weeks on June 19 and I imagine I’ll end up buying it again, despite having a delightfully free proof copy in my hands. That’s partly cause of the funky multicoloured folk creatures on the cover but more because I want to have an edition with accurate page numbers I can quote from in my PhD. I’m gonna build some funky weird stuff about soil out of this.