Dictionaries as Sources of Folklore Data ed. by Jonathan Roper (review)

Folklorists are very creative when it comes to finding sources of folklore, and students of dictionaries likewise know that dictionaries can be used in many ways beyond their immediate functions. Jonathan Roper, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Folklore at the University of Tartu, has edited a collection of ten articles that begin a fruitful avenue of research into the use of dictionaries as a reservoir of folklore.

After an introduction by Roper, the collection consists of three sections of three articles each: Folklore in the Formation of Dictionaries, Case Studies of Dictionaries, and Folklore in Dictionaries: Methodological Considerations. All the chapters are based on real-life data in the dictionaries themselves, usually also based in fieldwork. Each has something significant to say about the role folklore can play in the compilation of dictionaries and how dictionaries can inform the folklorist. I am going to end this review by focusing on Roper’s introduction.

The first section, Folklore in the Formation of Dictionaries, begins with a discussion of how Roman Catholic priest Patrick Dinneen strove to compile a dictionary of “an unsettled language like Irish,” necessitating the use of proverbs and sayings, customs, and beliefs. There are even references to material culture of the Irish in this 1904 work. Timothy R. Tangherlini from the Department of Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley, looks at a dictionary of Jutland folk speech published in four volumes between 1886 and 1914. He starts with a history of Danish dictionaries, a subject likely unknown to most English-speaking readers. Henning Feilberg, the compiler of the dictionary, was a chaplain in southern Jutland and though he had little experience as a fieldworker, he used a large variety of folklore sources including a network of collectors. Tangherlini concludes with an overview of the future of Jutlandic dialect dictionaries. Focusing on John Sampson’s 1926 dictionary of Welsh Gypsy (Romani) dialect, Jeremy Harte notes that Sampson was a fieldworker par excellence. He collected folktales, superstitions, and other belief narratives. The problem may be that such collecting may skew an outsider’s worldview of the Gypsies as a backward group. Roper in his Preface notes that the articles in this section are connected by their attention to the past, almost reclamatory work as well as their afterlife.

The second section is most explicitly devoted to case studies, though all the chapters are case studies in some sense. What makes the chapter by Zoja Karanović and Jasmina Dražić on the 1818 Srpski rječnik (The Serbian Dictionary) and its 1852 revision most interesting is how a dictionary can play an important role in a culture. Its compiler, Vuk Karadžić, looms large in the development of Serbian culture more generally, having produced other works on folk songs and ethnology. Naturally, these materials were included in his dictionary as well as superstitions and mythological beliefs and even humor. Compiled in Latin, since Frisian was chiefly a spoken language in the nineteenth century, Joost Hiddes Halbertsma’s 1872 Lexicon Frisicum is the subject of Anne Dykstra’s chapter. What makes this dictionary unique is its focus on superstitions and the lengthy entries expounding them. By looking at a variety of Greek dictionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Haralampos Passalis notes that they “constitute products of an era, whose main aim was to prove the relation of Modern Greek customs and language with those of antiquity” (pp. 161–62). All of which is to say that the materials were included as a demonstration of antiquity that was encouraged by larger social forces. The entire effort was caught, as Passalis calls it, between the folklorist and the lexicographer.

The final section is devoted to methodological considerations. The famous Dictionary of English/Creole of Trinidad and Tobago is the first example. The methodological problem here is one of inclusion, according to Lise Winer, author of not only the chapter but also of the...