Encyclopedia of Urban Legends (review)

Including this one, Jan Brunvand is the author of ten compilations of urban legends spanning more than 20 years, a syndicated column, and numerous papers. His name is now so closely associated with "urban legend" that anybody else working in the field feels compelled to use a different term to describe what s/he does—"modern legend," "belief legend," or "contemporary legend," which is the Sheffield school's preferred term. Brunvand is responsible for bringing countless "new" urban legends to scholars' attention, for putting the term "urban legend" into the vocabulary of journalists and others working in the media, and for familiarizing the world in general with the genre. His industry is as prodigious as his success, and his influence cannot be overestimated.

The present book is large, well-designed, easy to use, and illustrated with little cartoon-like line-drawings by Randy Hickman. It looks good. There are in the region of 1,000 entries. Most of these are story types, but other entries cover generic topics such as "animals" and "accidents," and theoretical terms such as "ostension" and "legend-tripping"; there are also entries for "Canada," "England," "Sweden" and so on that outline the work of scholars in those countries. It is as comprehensive as the author can make it. It is obviously going to be a "must have" for those of us who have to answer daft questions from journalists, and it will doubtless become the student's "bible."

For these reasons, one must be frank about its shortcomings. First of all, despite being called an "encyclopedia" it is actually pretty much like everything that went before, a sort of super-round-up of stories from Brunvand's files. It seems to me to fall between two stools: on the one hand, as well as listing story types it tries to cover a large number of theoretical terms and considerations (this probably won't interest the general reader); on the other hand the individual entries are often slapdash (this won't satisfy the serious scholar). To be honest, scholars are not his natural audience anyway. At heart he is a storyteller, at his best discoursing in an intimate and often humorous style, presenting the foibles of the human race as represented in modern legends, letting the stories do the talking. Hence, perhaps, his unease at the turn which events have taken recently, the transfer of the genre from a primarily oral mode of transmission to the internet, television and popular film. This is a problem he deals with in his "Introduction" but cannot really solve. It is strange this should upset him so much, since, more than anybody else working in the field, through the number and popularity of his books Brunvand has turned urban legend into a phenomenon of popular culture. Only his first book, The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981), is a serious work of scholarship; the others are more or less overtly story compilations. Personally I have no quarrel with this, since Brunvand has brought so many new legends to our attention and he is welcome to do this any way he wants.

But given this orientation to popular writing, it may have been a mistake to undertake a work calling itself an "encyclopedia" as a solo exercise. However well-informed the writer, it is impossible to deal with so many entries equally satisfactorily. Mistakes, oversimplifications, misrepresentations and so on are bound to occur. No one's data-base is that good, even Jan Brunvand's. It would have been much better to cut down the number of entries to a core of terms and types and to invite friends and colleagues to contribute specific entries in the usual way. This would also have helped him avoid the two characteristics of the book that many people will find most irritating—his reliance on his own previous books for information and references, and his neglect of non-American...