What's True in Mormon Folklore?: The Contribution of Folklore to Mormon Studies

What’s True in Mormon Folklore?

1 What’s True in Mormon Folklore? The Contribution of Folklore to Mormon Studies It’s an honor to deliver the annual Leonard J. Arrington address. In 1985, I published a fairly nondescript little article entitled “‘We Did Everything Together’: Farming Customs of the Mountainwest” in Northwest Folklore, a journal with a very limited subscription list.1 None of my folklore colleagues ever commented on the piece, probably because few of them had ever seen it. But, to my great surprise, shortly after the article had appeared in print, I received a friendly note from Leonard Arrington praising the article and recounting how my experiences growing up in Idaho farm country paralleled his own. And it was ever thus. Until the day he died Leonard continued to encourage me along the way. In spite of my positive experiences with Leonard, the task that lies before me this evening is a daunting one. All twelve lecturers who have occupied this podium before me have been historians. I am a folklorist. I have always believed that folklorists and historians, as well as scholars from other disciplines, ought to cooperate more often than they usually do. This evening I’ll attempt to correct here two misconceptions about folklore that sometimes make this cooperation more difficult than it needs to be. In doing so I’ll try to explain why those of us who take the subject seriously believe that folklore research should play an important part of any program devoted to the study of Mormon culture. But first, to make sure we are all on the same page, I had better begin with a definition of the materials folklorists work with. We consider folklore to be that part of our culture that we transmit through time (from age to age) and through space (from place to place), not by formal instruction or the written word, but in face-to-face encounters with other people through the processes of oral transmission or customary example. That is, a father or mother will tell a child a story of 2 Arrington Mormon History Lecture hardships encountered by pioneer ancestors as they crossed the plains; the child will, in turn, one day tell the same story to his or her own children. Or a young girl may help her mother stitch a pedigree chart onto a genealogy quilt and then will one day make her own quilts with her own daughter at her elbow. Or a group of older scouts on a campout will send tenderfoots in the group on a snipe hunt. The next year these young men, now experienced scouters, will initiate the next crop of tenderfoots with another snipe hunt, and all will be drawn more tightly into a cohesive unit. As these examples suggest, the materials we collect and study include things we make with words (verbal lore), things we make with our hands (material lore), and things we make with our actions (customary lore). Because I come from a background in literature, I have been most interested in things we make with words and they will be my primary focus this evening. Further, from the broad field of verbal lore I will speak mostly about legends, stories the narrators generally believe to be true. You should remember, however, that one must study all forms of Mormon folklore to achieve a comprehensive view of Mormon life. Because these cultural artifacts we call folklore depend, for their survival and dissemination, on the spoken word or on observation and imitation, they will often migrate well beyond their places of origin and will in the process spin off numerous variant forms. Nonetheless, different versions of a single form will be identifiable as related to each other by their internal structure. For example, stories of the Three Nephites, those ancient American disciples of Christ believed by Mormons to still be walking the earth, will, no matter what the details of individual stories, almost always have the same narrative structure: someone has a spiritual or physical problem, a stranger appears from nowhere, the stranger solves the problem, the stranger disappears, usually miraculously. Similarly, no matter what the overall patterns of several log cabin quilts, they can be identified as the same type because of the structural design of their individual blocks. The trouble with this definition, so far, is that it focuses on “things” and leaves out “people”—the folk. People are always more important than things. Our goal in folklore research is, or should be, to understand...