Introduction: Emerging Legends in Contemporary Society

This JAF special issue is based on a double forum, "Present State and Future of the Contemporary Legend and its Research," held at the 2002 annual meetings of the American Folklore Society in Rochester, New York. The forum, chaired by Linda Dégh, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, featured fourteen speakers (not "twelve disciples" as the folklore of this forum has since asserted!) who were asked to participate because we had been, as Dégh reminded us, among "the first" to work with her on legend study. We had all been graduate students who had taken a seminar with Dégh at some point in what we might fondly call the "Golden Age" of legend study at Indiana in the 1960s through the 1980s. Some of us had served as editorial assistants on the journal Indiana Folklore, founded by Dégh in 1968 for the publication of field research data and critical discussion of the genre that ran until 1984, and all of us had pursued legend research individually in one way or another over the intervening years as academic folklorists.¹

On that October day in the fall of 2002, we came together in a mood that was both somber and joyful. Five weeks before, Americans had observed the first anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001. Because the previous year's AFS meetings in Anchorage, Alaska, had been disrupted by the attacks, those of us involved in the forum were especially happy to see each other and to celebrate the publication of Dégh's magnum opus, Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Genre (2001), an important synthesis of years of ground-breaking scholarship that would be the springboard for our presentations that day and would receive the University of Chicago Folklore Prize for that year.

In deciding to put together the special issue, we coeditors shared a double goal with the other three contributors who developed articles from their forum discussions. First, we wished to honor Dégh, whose legend scholarship has fused European and American approaches to narrative analysis in ways that have influenced, and will continue to influence, our own research. Second, we wished to do her the higher honor of moving in other directions as well that reflect both the diversity of our own research interests and the scholarship of others in the field. We agree with her that legend study, like the legend itself, is a dynamic, evolving process.

In considering the first goal, we recognize that other publications—namely, Folklore on Two Continents: Essays in Honor of Linda Dégh (Burlakoff and Lindahl 1980) and her own Narratives in Society (1995) and Legend and Belief (2001)—have already outlined her contributions. Yet, in the summer of 2003, we learned more particulars about Dégh's ethnographic-centered folk narrative research. For once, the tables were turned; this intrepid folklorist, who had spent so many hours recording others' stories, kindly agreed to tell stories about her life and work. In her comfortable kitchen in Bloomington, with cats Oliver and Midnight frisking nearby, she narrated a mesmerizing sequence of tales, intertwining her life history and folkloristics.²

Taking a cue from these interviews, we envision this introduction as creative nonfiction, overlaying as it does Dégh's personal experience narratives with folktale plots, legend questions, and critical analyses from various vantage points. We hope that this approach will open up the emergent possibilities of the legend genre and its study, accomplishing our second goal as well. We begin, then, with one question that applies to all of us who study the legend: what life experiences have contributed to our interest in this genre? In his illuminating book, Hope Dies Last (2003), Studs Terkel suggests that what happens to us early in life prefigures, to some extent, the course of our lives as adults. Spending his formative years in the lobby of the men's hotel in Chicago that his mother ran after his father's death, Terkel got to know "a motley...