Gripla - 20.12.2018, Side 309

309
JOHN LINDOW
FOLKLORISTICS, MYTH, AND RELIGION
Speech Delivered on the Occasion
of Professor Lindow’s Acceptance of an Honorary Doctorate
from the University of Iceland, 14th May 2018
as a folklorist,1 I will begin with a story.
not too long ago (Spring 2017) Dan Ben amos, the eminent folklorist
at the university of Pennsylvania, asked me to contribute an article to a
special issue of the online journal Humanities that he was to edit. as he
told the story, the editors at Humanities had asked for an issue on “The
challenge to folklore studies,” but he informed them that that issue had
been settled fifty years ago. Indeed it had, not least through his own break-
through rethinking of folkloristics as the study not of individual items,
such as folktales or proverbs, but of the entire process which enabled such
items to be transmitted over time and from place to place. We now call this
conception of folkloristics the “performance turn,” understanding perform-
ance to be the occasion on which some member of a community tells a tale
or utters a proverb or enacts some other aspect of tradition; and as I have
come to see it, it extricated the field of folkloristics from its position on
the margins of other disciplines. the challenge to folkloristics having thus
been met 50 years ago, Ben Amos suggested to the editors of Humanities a
special issue on the challenges folkloristics could pose to other disciplines,
and he asked me to write on the challenge of folkloristics to medieval
studies. that piece appeared earlier this year (2018), but I have continued
to think about the issues it took up, and today I would like to add into the
mix the research areas of myth and religion,2 which at this university, and
at many others, are studied in conjunction with the field of folkloristics.
1 folklorists know that texts need not be fixed. this one is not: it has been gently edited
somewhat since the oral performance, with a few additions and subtractions.
2 Some of these issues are also treated in John Lindow, “the rise of folklore Studies,” Pre-
Christian Religions of the North: Research and Reception, ed. by Margaret Clunies Ross, vol.
2 (turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming 2018).
Gripla XXIX (2018): 309–322