This article aims to show how South Slavic oral lyric songs in love and wedding contexts construct the images of an ‘undesired Other’. The multiform Other may be a temporary Other within the in-group, while going through the liminal phase of the wedding rite of passage; or an outsider-Other by virtue of ethnicity, religion, or social status. The undesired Other is both known and unknown, dangerous and in danger, inferior and superior. He or she may be modelled as the ethnic and social Other, and ultimately as inhuman. The undesired Other functions primarily as a mean to articulate the fears, anxieties, hopes, and longings of young people of marriageable age.

Roger L. Janelli was a pioneer figure in both folklore studies and Korean studies in the USA. Born in 1943 to an Italian-American family, Janelli was raised in the Bronx, New York City, and studied...

According to the back cover, Folk Magic and Healing aims ‘to inspire a greater appreciation of our wild plants and countryside’, while the introduction states ‘it is written solely for informationa...

Gods and Rollercoasters explores the growing phenomenon that is the religious theme park. Our guide over ten chapters, and ranging geographically across the USA and Southeast Asia, is Crispin Paine...

"The Faust Tales of Christoph Rosshirt. A Critical Edition with Commentary." Folklore, 132(1), pp. 107–108

The Schools’ Scheme was a systematic national survey of folklore conducted in the Republic of Ireland in 1937–38 and is now part of the National Folklore Collection (NFC) at University College Dublin. Medical folklore and the curative powers of holy wells were prominent in the Schools’ Scheme, and in the ensuing Schools’ Collection (NFCS). A representative sample of cures from the NFCS was examined in this study, which included a total of 6,843 separate cures for various ailments. This article focuses specifically on wart cures—by far the most common ailment nationally for which a cure was collected. There are 749 separate wart cures, coming from every county in the Republic of Ireland.

Bridges Between Worlds reads as a personal memoir concerning time the author spent in Iceland’s northern town of Akureyri and her engagement in seances there. Corinne Dempsey correctly connects the...

This article discusses the representation of mounds and the role of mound-dwelling spirits in the folklore of the Orkney Islands. The focus is on potential differences in mentalities that might have influenced the perception of mounds not only over time, but also depending on place. Importantly, the intention is not to define an ‘original’ state of Orcadian lore at any given point in time. In order to examine the representation of Orcadian mounds in local lore, however, there is value in examining a variety of impacts on Orcadian folklore over the past millennium. This discussion draws on archaeology, as well as on migratory legends and tale types from Orkney, to consider international parallels, especially within the Norse diaspora.

In the wake of recent demands for research serving society, old archived folklore records have been challenged as worthless except as material for a bonfire because most records lack enough contextual information for a folklorist to be able to say anything about the situation in which a narrative was performed. What can a folklorist do with such texts? This article offers several suggestions for how to use archived folklore records for different purposes, from research to tourism. Certainly, comparison is one relevant research method, but it is also possible to conduct historical and intertextual studies. The records also help to create biographical investigations of narrators and collectors.

Kirk Ambrose opens The Marvellous and the Monstrous in the Sculptures of Twelfth-Century Europe (first published in hardback in 2013) with a Preface containing the confession that he had long been ...