Linda Dégh (1918–2014)

Linda Dégh passed away at her home in Bloomington, Indiana, on August 19, 2014. She was born March 18, 1918, to Károly Doktor and Jolán Engl Doktor in Budapest, Hungary. A graduate of Péter Pázmány University, she taught at Eötvös Loránd University’s folklore department until Richard M. Dorson invited her to come to Indiana University in 1964. She became an Indiana University Distinguished Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology in 1982.

After Linda’s passing, friends told me they felt surprised and bereft. Linda was such a star of folktale and legend studies, such a force of nature; how could she not be with us anymore? She had been my mentor for almost 40 years. Although we understood that, at the age of 96, Linda could not be with us forever, it seemed incomprehensible that she was gone.

Comfort came from The Stars of Ballyme-none, by Henry Glassie, another one of my favorite professors at Indiana University. Describing the death of Hugh Nolan, his “star of the Irish twilight,” Glassie observed: “He was an old man, and old men die. That is how it is, people come and go. Then, slowly, like fog in the night, understanding came over me, and I broke down and wept. No death has hit me harder. I knew what the world lost in his passing” (2006:1).

This description has helped me articulate how I feel about the loss of Linda Dégh. Like Hugh Nolan, she lived a long life, did important work, and left a strong legacy. She became a star in the field of folklore, lived with gusto on two continents, survived political turmoil, and dedicated herself to explicating the art of storytelling as nobody ever had before. With her passing comes the end of an era.

A week before Linda passed away, we had a lively telephone conversation. As usual, she wanted to talk about folklore and her plans for a future book, but this time, she wanted to tell me a story about knocking on a certain door in Hungary many years ago. She had knocked on that door as a doctoral student beginning fieldwork for her dissertation.

The door belonged to Uncle Péter Pandur, a master storyteller whose folktales represented generations of narrators in that part of Hungary. Uncle Péter was blind, so he always asked people who came to his door to identify themselves. His favorite visitors were storytellers and others who cared about stories.

In Linda’s own words, this is what happened: “I was standing at his door, asking to come in, and he called, ‘Who are you? I can’t see you. Do you tell stories?’ He asked me to come inside. And that was how my dissertation began.”

It was poignant to hear Linda recall asking if she could come through a door to meet the storyteller from whom she would collect stories for her dissertation. At that time, she was approaching another door, life’s final passage, so it is not surprising that she remembered her dissertation, completed in 1942.

Janet Langlois and I had enjoyed hearing some of Linda’s family stories when we wrote the introduction to a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore in her honor 10 years ago. We learned that Linda, the youngest of three children, had spent childhood summers on her aunt’s estate, playing pranks with her cousins and getting to know people who lived nearby. When some of those people told stories to Linda, she wrote them down with whatever materials she had available, including pieces of board and bark. Like Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, she gained her first awareness of folklore as a child by listening sensitively to rural people’s stories.

Linda studied with the well-known Hungarian folklorist Gyula Ortutay, whose methodology focused on comparison of texts, and developed her own contextual approach that explored the personalities, performances, and social interactions of individual storytellers. The depth and insight of her study of the Székely storyteller Zsuzsanna Palkó profoundly influenced the development of American contextual studies of...