Folklore Matters

A very special episode to close series two: Dave Clarke and Andrew Robinson interview Professor John Widdowson at home in the Peak District.

For many listeners, John will need no introduction. John has been at the forefront of Folkloristics and dialect studies in the UK for decades. Following degrees from Oxford, Leeds and Memorial University, Canada, John founded the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language (CECTAL) at the University of Sheffield, which later became the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition (NATCECT), where he served as its director for four decades. Dave Clarke was one of his PhD students in the 1990s.

In an article for Folklore in 2016, John called for a new national folklore survey, and it was this that ultimately inspired our current project.

In this episode, John reflects on his introduction to folklore, his career and his research, his survey which began in the 1960s - and that famous red mini.

You can find information about the John Widdowson Folklore Collection at Sheffield Hallam here: https://libguides.shu.ac.uk/c.php?g=55836&p=5005486

A huge thank you to Andrew Robinson for recording and editing this episode.

It’d be daft of us if we didn’t speak to our very own Dave Clarke. Probably best known as a world expert on UFOs, Dave has also researched a whole host of other folklore-related stories, trends, ideas and concepts, writing numerous books and appearing frequently on documentaries and podcasts (including most recently Sky’s The Alien Autopsy Scandal). His new book on the folklore of space is out next year.

You can find his website here: https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/

This podcast was recorded remotely on the then-hottest day of the year, so please excuse any differences in sound levels and quality.

Anna Milon and Christopher Ohge are two researchers working on a collaborative project between UK and German universities that seeks to create a digital tool that helps researchers navigate large folk narrative collections. Project StoryMachine is in its infancy, but its capabilities are already pretty exciting. Anna and Christopher tell us more here.

To find out more about StoryMachine, visit the website here: https://storymachine.iisys.de/

The Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project is still active and you can find it here: https://lincolnshirefolktalesproject.com/

Why is folk culture in the spotlight in the UK at the moment? What are the most exciting things going on? Do we have to think about how folk culture is organised and presented, and what are the differences between folk culture and the folk scene?

The Folk Union is a fascinating project that has grown exponentially. You can read more about it here, and buy some of the pamphlets Mike discusses: https://thefolkunion.com/

The Offbeat Folk Film Club is here: https://offbeat.film/

And you can find out more about Mike, his research and his other work here: https://mikehankin.com/

You may find that Mike is a little quiet in this episode. Apologies! Please crank up your volume to eleven, as he has some great things to say!

Dave and Diane had the pleasure of meeting Jack Werner at the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) annual conference in Stockholm and knew he’d made a fascinating future guest for Folklore Matters. Jack is the presenter of the Swedish version of Uncanny – he tells us how to pronounce the Swedish title properly in the episode! – and has been researching contemporary legends in Sweden, or Vandringssägen, for many years. Jack’s newsletter can be found here: https://vandringssagen.se/

There were several things we discussed in the episode that will be easy to look up, but we thought it would be worth including the link to the archival reconstruction of ‘Ted's Caving Page’ that Jack mentioned as one of his favourite creepypastas: https://teds-caving-page.netlify.app/ and the Wikipedia page about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_the_Caver

Klára Feikusová is a Czech scholar with a penchant for horror on screen, especially folk horror, so we were delighted when she stopped by Sheffield on her trip to the UK and agreed to appear on the podcast.

Klára mentions legendary Czech film director František Vláčil in the podcast. If you’d like to know more about him and his works, please visit: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/frantisek-vlacil

Klára also talked about the legend of the horse that appears on a building near to where she lives. This following site explains the legend in Czech, but there is an option to translate the page to English: https://www.moravskyturista.cz/2014/10/olomouc-dum-u-cerneho-kone.html

Welcome back to Folklore Matters! We're delighted to be bringing you more compelling interviews with people working with folklore in myriad ways, from academic research to popular culture.

To kick off series two, we meet Dave Brewis, a filmmaker with over two decades of experience in filming calendar customs in the UK and in France. His recent series, Gatherings, examines six UK customs in detail. We wanted to know how this came about, and why calendar customs are so important to communities.

To find out more about Gatherings, and how to watch it, please visit: https://gatherings.tv/

Now that our first ever series of Folklore Matters is out there, hosts and researchers, Diane Rodgers and Sophie Parkes-Nield, give a quick overview of their favourite moments.

Professor Helen Wheatley is a legendary television scholar who has published seminal books, such as Gothic Television, the award-winning Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure, and more recently Television/Death, a study of death, bereavement and dying on television. In this episode of Folklore Matters - the final episode of series one - Helen joins Diane Rodgers in the studio to talk about folk horror (especially when it wasn't really known as folk horror), gothic television, and why television makers in the late twentieth century scared children.

Folklore is massive on social media, and around May Day and Halloween, you may have seen films and photographs of people dancing on their own or in small groups to celebrate seasonal change. If so, it may have been at the instigation of artist and activist, Lucy Wright, our guest in this latest episode of Folklore Matters. Lucy is a prolific polymath: academic, musician, artist, and writer. In this episode, she discusses who gets to participate in folklore, and how and why creation matters.