Author Archives: Andrew Hornblower

Annotated Piece 2 – Analysis of NY Times Article “Talk with Your Fingers”

The following post is a brief analysis of the article written by John McWhorter, an opinion contributor to the New York Times.

A link to the article can be found here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/talking-with-your-fingers/?ref=opinion

This article caught my attention as one that, perhaps unknowingly, provides an excellent modern take on how folklore is tied to written communication. I highly recommend that you at least briefly read this article, as it contains a unique perspective on an issue that is relevant to all of us: written electronic communication. In the age of text messages and emails, it seems many of us go hours without a single meaningful face-to-face interaction. In addition, the very nature of our communication expectations has accelerated, making us more impatient than ever.

In this article, John McWhorter explains that written communication’s inception was not dissimilar from the text messages of today. Citing “The Epic of Gilgamesh” McWhorter includes a passage that was used to describe the fall of a city:

I will pull down the Gates of Hell itself,

Crush the doorposts and flatten the door,

And I will let the dead leave

And let the dead roam the earth

And they shall eat the living.

McWhorter points out that Gilgamesh was in fact a canonized piece of the region’s folklore. Because spoken word strives for efficiency (according to McWhorter), the story of Gilgamesh is told in relatively short bundles of words.

This is how McWhorter knows that “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was in fact a piece of transcribed oral history, not a previously written story.

McWhorter states further that the modern “text and email” culture is in fact moving back toward the ancient story of Gilgamesh’s style. This is a result of technology allowing us to more closely tie our verbal communication to its written counterparts.

In essence, I am implying that from McWhorter’s article, we must continue to challenge our current notion that folklore is solely comprised of live oral performances.

 

 

Annotated Piece 1 – William Wallace in the Movie Braveheart

Nationality: American
Age: Released in 1995
Primary Language: English

The following post is a brief analysis of folklore’s presence in the film Braveheart. It contains several key quotes and examples that indicate how this film showcases the oral tradition of Medieval Scotland.

 

The movie Braveheart, directed by and starring Mel Gibson, could not have been created without the aid of folkloric descriptions of William Wallace. The movie even contains clear examples of how our understanding of the great hero has been shaped by oral tradition.

Gibson chose to insert several examples of this in action in the heart of the movie. While rallying his troops prior to the movie’s depiction of the Battle of Stirling, a peasant soldier challenges Wallace, accusing him of being a fraud, for, “William Wallace is 7 feet tall.” In response, Wallace replies, “Yes, I’ve heard, he kills men by the hundreds. If he were here, he’d consume the English with fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightening from his arse” (Gibson, Braveheart).

Later in the film, the audience sees several instances of these exaggerations connected into one montage. The first scene shows an old man speaking to an assembled group around a fire.

He says to them, “William Wallace killed fifty men, fifty, as if it was one”.  The movie then cuts to another scene where a man is speaking earnestly to another across a tavern’s table.

He says, “Wallace killed 100 men, cut through them like Moses through the Red Sea”

These subtle dialogues may not bear significance beyond its humor to the casual viewer, but to an analyst of Folklore, it demonstrates clearly what was occurring all across the Scottish countryside at that time. Wallace was moving from man to myth. This myth is what we see portrayed in Braveheart, and it is what has been canonized into an essential component of Scottish culture.

Taiwanese Superstition – Dreams About Losing Teeth

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 1/28/12

My friend friend from home is of Taiwanese descent. She is insanely OCD about her teeth, and brushes them 5 times a day. I too am pretty concerned with my oral health, and after being friends for a few months, she began to pick up on it.

One day while we were chatting, I mentioned that the night before I had had a terrible dream about losing my teeth- not just one or two, but all of my teeth in a car accident. She stared at me and said, “that’s funny, my Dad would be really upset if I told him my boyfriend had such a dream”. She went on to explain,  “My Dad always told me that having dreams about losing teeth is extremely bad luck. He advised me to avoid people who have these dreams.”

It is interesting to contemplate the origins of this Taiwanese superstition. My friend had not read it anywhere, and neither had her father. Therefore, both had been informed of the superstition through the oral performances of others. Perhaps this superstition was originally created to stifle vanity? Or maybe it is a result of a more complicated cultural matrix of superstitions that combine around the pair of teeth and dreams.

Words of Wisdom From The Chef

Nationality: Jamaican
Age: 38
Occupation: Chef
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 2/20/12
Primary Language: English

My fraternity’s chef is Jamaican, and always tells us to “eat your eggs before your toast, and you will be strong.”

Before taking this class, I didn’t think much of him saying this. Since last August when we first hired him as our chef, he has repeated this phrase without fail every time he has served us eggs and toast. After the first few weeks of taking this class, I realized that what he was saying might in fact be a Jamaican proverb. I asked him one morning, and sure enough, he had learned it from his mother while growing up in Jamaica. According to our chef, she would always serve him eggs and toast at the same time, but instructed him never to eat the toast before the eggs.

When contemplating the reason for this tradition, two possible explanations come to mind. First, our chef claims that his mother believes bad luck follows those who eat toast before eggs. This is not a scientific statement, but nevertheless carries weight in Jamaican culture.

The second possible explanation is biological. Before the benefits of modern medicine, trial and error was usually the best method of medical testing. Perhaps after hundreds of years of eating certain combinations of foods, Jamaicans began to notice that when they ate eggs before their bread, they became physically stronger. There is a biological explanation for this phenomenon. Eggs are one of the most protein-rich foods available on Jamaica. Protein takes a longer time to digest than bread, which is primarily comprised of carbohydrates. Protein is much more closely tied to strength than carbohydrates. If the body is given more “alone-time” with the substance that is harder to break down, is it not possible that physical performance would increase as a result- especially if this substance is closely tied to muscle recovery?

It is interesting to contemplate the reasons for this proverb’s origin. The reality is that it most likely originated from a combination of  both the aforementioned factors, in addition to other societal and cultural influences.

Family Initiation – Sooty Plates

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Boston
Performance Date: 3/27/12
Primary Language: English

One of my good friends in High School’s family initiates new members in a very peculiar way. This right of passage is done at liminal points in time. Normally, on wedding weekends, her family conspirea to embarrass the unsuspecting victim. For a select group of close friends and me, she decided to get all of us right before we left for college. The premise of the prank is that her family wants to teach the victim family secrets about mental relaxation. I called my friend to give me the full run-down on how this prank is effectively carried out, seeing as I was blindfolded the entire time it was being done to me.

  • The victim(s) are gathered into a dark room and told to sit down.
  • As they wait on the ground, they are told to close their eyes.
  • After being instructed to take several deep breaths, the victims are handed a cold plate.
  • The victims are told to slowly rub the cold plate with their hands, feel its temperature with every breath, but not to open their eyes, as it will ruin the sensation.
  • After the victims have rubbed their cold plate, they are instructed to press their cold plate against their cheeks.
  • Slowly, they are told to move the plate around their face, feeling every square inch of the cool plate against their skin.
  • To conclude, the victims are instructed to place their plates on the ground in front of them, and place their hands on their face firmly, allowing every bit of the coolness to transfer from the plate to their bodies.
  • Then all of a sudden, the orchestrator turns on the lights, and shouts for everyone to open their eyes.
  • The victims are horrified to realize that their faces are completely covered in soot, and the cool plate they had bee holding was previously coated in the black substance.

My friend is not sure when her family’s prank originated, and neither does her father. It is amazing to think that this prank could go back hundreds of years, all as a result of oral communication from generation to generation.