Folklore Rules: A Fun, Quick, and Useful Introduction to the Field of Academic Folklore Studies by Lynne S. McNeill (review)

What is the first and most frequently asked question in a folklorist’s existence? Undoubtedly, it’s “So, what is folklore?” Beyond supplying a simple definition in a conversational setting, folklorists in higher education have the added responsibility of illuminating the term, in all its tangled origins and debated variations, for a variety of students over the course of their careers. Lynne McNeill’s Folklore Rules is a guide for folklorists who need to introduce the multi-layered field to newcomers, as well as a compass for anyone at the beginning of a journey into the field.

McNeill explains the impetus for writing this slim volume in the opening section titled “For the Instructor: Why You Want to Use This Book.” Because the majority of folklorists in higher education teach in departments ranging from English to history to communications, they often interact with students who have no knowledge of the basics of folklore study. Whether in freshman composition, Introduction to Folklore, or an upper division course of “Folklore and Fill-in-the-Blank,” the instructor is faced with packing a semester’s worth of introductory information into a few class periods, for the sake of the specialized material that the course must cover (p. xiii). While several tried-and-true introductory textbooks exist, they are best suited to courses with much more room in the syllabus for discussing the basics of the field than that of the average class that a folklorist teaches. McNeill set out to write a concise guide that manages to orient newcomers quickly to academic folklore studies by providing numerous examples, heading off common misconceptions, briefly describing seminal works, and generally welcoming students to the process of stepping back and looking with a folklorist’s lens at themselves, their families, friends, and the world at large.

The four chapters of Folklore Rules represent basic building blocks of the field: definitions of folklore, what a folklorist does, types of folklore, and types of folk groups. McNeill begins by explaining the informal nature of folklore, how it expresses group consensus, and the ways in which it is transmitted. Her descriptions of folklore fieldwork and analysis are paired with examples of student work from her own career interacting with new folklore students. The genres chapter follows William A. Wilson’s categories of analysis—things that the folk say, do, make, and believe. The folk groups chapter features a short discussion on the evolving study of folklore in the digital realm.

Some of the outstanding features of this book are the “Want to Know More?” sections that are interspersed through the chapters, and the “Notes” sections that appear at the end of each chapter. If readers do want to learn more, they will find small clips of annotated bibliographic information describing the major works that could be considered the heavy hitters of the field. While other textbooks might discuss tape-recorded interviews, small forgotten things, and terrors in the night at length, this book references the complexities and nuances of the study of folklore without getting sidetracked. These sections provide just enough information for students to know where to place their next steps. The “Notes” sections provide further clarification of terms, biographical information about notable folklorists and other scholars, and sometimes just entertaining parenthetical statements that uphold the entire book’s conversational, enthusiastic tone. After recounting David Hufford’s work on the connection between what doctors term “sleep paralysis with hypnagogic hallucinations” and what folk belief might call “the Old Hag,” McNeill adds this endnote:

We should wonder why we assume that the medical phenomenon ‘explains’ the traditional belief. . . . Rather than saying that someone experiences the Old Hag because they have sleep paralysis with hypnagogic hallucinations, maybe people experience sleep paralysis with hypnagogic hallucinations because the Old Hag has come to visit. Think about that when you’re falling asleep tonight.

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