Eleanor R. Long-Wilgus (1923-2005)

Folklore and balladry scholar Eleanor R. Long-Wilgus died on May 8, 2005, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, after a long period of declining health, just a few days after publication of her last book, On the Banks of Mulroy Bay: Stories and Songs about William Sydney Clements, Third Earl of Leitrim (Chapel Hill Press, 2005), coauthored with her late husband, D. K. Wilgus.

Long-Wilgus was born February 9, 1923, in Seattle, Washington, the eldest daughter of Earl Percy Jones and Myrtle Eleanor Jones. She was proud of the fact that, through her paternal grandparents, she was descended from Francis Jones, who was a member of the Cane Creek Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends in nearby Alamance County, North Carolina from 1755 to 1772.

She earned her B.S. in general studies with honors from Portland State College (now Portland State University) in 1957 and an M.A. in English literature from the University of Portland in 1958. In 1968, she received the Ph.D. in English literature and folklore, with distinction, from the University of California at Los Angeles. Her dissertation, "The Maid" and "The Hangman": Myth and Tradition in a Popular Ballad (University of California Press, 1971), was a historic-geographic study of the Anglo-American ballad designated Child #95, "The Maid Freed from the Gallows," and its long evolution from folktales of ancient Egypt and Greece. It was awarded the Chicago Folklore Prize in 1971.

From 1968 to 1985, she taught folklore, comparative mythology, and Medieval literature at Santa Clara University (California), the University of Saskatchewan (Canada), the University of California at Los Angeles, and California State University at Long Beach. From 1983 to 1989, she served as senior editor of publications at the Oriental Healing Arts Institute of Long Beach, California.

She was a member of the Modern Language Association, the American Folklore Society, the Irish Folklore Society, the Canadian Society for Traditional Music, the International Arthurian Society, the International Commission for Ballad Research, and the North Carolina Folklore Society.

A major focus of her scholarly career was the comparative study of narrative folksong and popular traditions, doubtless influenced by her two distinguished teachers at UCLA, Wayland Hand and D. K. Wilgus. With Wilgus she put considerable efforts into the problems of ballad classification, with particular attention to Irish balladry.

In 1993, not long after Wilgus's death, she relocated to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she resumed her research and writing and quickly became an active member of the local folklore community. Her generosity to the University of North Carolina was extraordinary. She first donated the D. K. Wilgus Collection to the University's Southern Folklife Collection and then added her own research collection. This gift of more than 11,000 items featured extensive research files on ballads and numerous materials relating to her husband's academic career. Later, she added their ballad library, consisting of more than 400 volumes. Through the curriculum in folklore, she also established the D. K. Wilgus Fellowship in Comparative Ballad and Folksong Study. Designed to honor the life and work of her husband, the fellowship will allow future students to continue the scholarly tradition exemplified by Wilgus and his students.

I first met Eleanor when I was helping to run the John Edwards Memorial Foundation at UCLA in the early 1960s. My then-wife was a graduate student in folklore, and she and Eleanor became immediate friends. I remember the first time Eleanor invited us both for dinner to her apartment in Westwood, not far from the UCLA campus. She had a second-storey balcony where she would sit and bask in the bright California sun—an understandable pleasure after her years in the sun-deficient Pacific Northwest. She was a stunningly attractive woman, svelte and fetchingly tanned from long hours on her balcony, reading and critiquing medievalist journals. Through hors d'oeuvres, drinks, and dinner, Eleanor regaled us with tales from her academic adventures and misadventures. She was brilliant and acerbic—in fact, somewhat intimidating; she had remarkably high scholarly standards and tolerated nothing less from others. Her studies in Anglo-American and European...