What Is A Belief Legend?

Author(s): Linda Dgh

Source: Folklore, Vol. 107 (1996), pp. 33-46
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.
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Folklore107 (1996):33-46

RESEARCH PAPER

What Is A Belief Legend?

Linda Degh

Abstract
As contributorto the mistakenlyconceptualisedconceptof "belieflegend,"I want to survey the
historicalantecedentsand the circumstancesthat at a certainstage promptedresearchersto
identifythis category,formerlyclassifiedas mythicalor demonologicallegend. This was the
time when legend scholarsbegan field-collection,experiencingthe profoundattachmentof
narrativesto living local folk religion.Afterdecadesof meticulousfield observation,which has
led to the accumulationof a moredependablestockof legendryfromdiversenational,subcul-
tural,occupationalgroups,it becomes clearthat folk belief is a partof any legend, therefore
thereis no need to maintainthe term "belieflegend."Beliefis the stimulatorand the purposeof
telling any narrativewithin the largercategoryof the legend genre;it is also the instigatorof the
legend dialectic.The currentconfusioncausedby the whimsicalapplicationof termssuch as
"truth,""rationality,""belief,"and "believability"in scholarlylegend interpretations,should
cautionus to avoid makingbiased,outsider'sjudgementsinsteadof presentingthe viewpoint of
tellersand audiences.

Preamble curs as the consequence of a sinful curse and divine

In the experience of folklorists, tellers state, explain,
interpretor at least imply their personal attitude to-
ward the belief content of the legend they tell. Atti-
tude toward belief is the essence of the genre and can
be expressed in diverse ways; whereby identical con-
tents-variants of the same legend type, may likewise
be developed differently,depending on diverse inter-
pretationsof similarextranormalexperiencesof indi-
vidual tellers. This peculiarly pivotal position of be-
lief in legend makes all legends belief legends.
I made this statement in the revised edition of
Folktalesand Society (1989) following my return to the
village of Kakasd eighteen years after the first edition
of my book appeared. There I was able to take stock of
current legendry composed of a handful of mass-me-
dia-inspired UFO and revenant stories, the old and un-
changed stories I knew, and their rejuvenated versions,
adapted to a technologically advanced environment:
village streets were now paved, electricity had been
introduced, and people drove cars and motorbikes, and
owned bathrooms, televisions, radios and tape record-
ers. From my first visit almost forty years earlier, I could
follow transgenerational continuity in legendry. Being
interested primarily in the art of storytelling and the
folktale repertoire of the villagers, I knew little before
this last visit about the intricacies of a network of folk
religion based on deeply devout Catholicism. I discov-
ered only then, and understood retrospectively, tradi-
tional community belief in black and white magic, en-
acted by the custom of ritual cursing and
countercursing as a formal Roman Catholic Church
ceremony, and attested case by case in whispered-
around legends. The belief that disease and death oc-
punishment answering prayer still permeates the reli-
gious belief of the villagers (Degh 1995, 341-57).
I should have realised that "belief" is an unneces-
sary epithet preceding the term "legend" when I pro-
posed a systematic study of the role indigenous belief
plays in legend formation (Degh 1963, 73) and contin-
ued to use the term "belief legend" after my discovery
of predominantly supernatural narratives on the
American urban-industrial scene.
In my often quoted conference paper, "The 'Belief
Legend' in Modern Society: Form, Function, and Re-
lationship to Other Genres" (Degh 1971, 55-68), I re-
ported for the first time the amazing stories of ordi-
nary people about encounters with revenants and the
tragic outcome of extranormal horrors in the collec-
tion of my students at Indiana University. In another
paper, "Neue Sagenerscheinungen in der industriellen
Umwelt der USA" (Degh 1973, 34-51). which I gave at
a legend conference in Freiburg, Germany, I further
elaborated the concept and the nature of supernatural
belief oriented legendry, expressing my excitement
over an unexpected wealth of stories that played an
important role in the life of youngAmericans, unknown
to me and others experiencing legends in Europe. At
that time, continental European folklorists were insen-
sitive to legends other than what old villagers re-
counted; most of them still are.
Characteristically, my search for variants of the "Sto-
len Grandmother" legend, which I first read in a Bu-
dapest newspaper in 1962 and heard often thereafter
in personalised versions, resulted mostly in succinct
abstracts because the fellow folklorists who sent them
to me did not recognise as folklore the stories they
heard from their urban-elite friends. It is true that sev-
34
eral scholars took the trouble to glean ghost or horror
stories from local newspapers and other popular prints
and manuscripts,1 to increase the number of variants
of field-collected "authentic" oral texts they analysed
comparatively, but they did not feel them worthy of
attention concerning context and textual accuracy. My
continued fieldwork in rural and urban Europe,
Canada and the United States, however, gave me new
insights into the legend as text, philosophy and be-
haviour; as personal, communal and mass perform-
ance; and as indicator of the transformation of the so-
cial world in the aftermath of the Second World War.
My experience in collecting from representatives of
diverse cultural groups, not theoretical presumptions,
convinced me that no distinction of a separate category
of legends as "belief legends" (belief tales, urban be-
lief tales) proposed by folklorists is justifiable because
belief is inherent in all legends. In fact, legend
contextualises and interprets belief.
In what follows, I will clarify my position by sur-
veying the history of the "belief legend" concept and
its uses in the writings of folklorists, showing how use-
ful the term was in genre identification and classifica-
tion attempts but how it has outlived its usefulness in
our time. I will discuss belief not as a folklore genre as
some folklorists have claimed (Gwyndaf 1994, 228),
but as the ideological foundation or core of the leg-
end. I will suggest that juxtaposition of belief and
knowledge-that is, religion and science-can be en-
lightening because in their dialectic ambiguity, as par-
allel opposites, both play important roles in the leg-
end process. Finally, I will show the futility of the cur-
rent legend name-giving inflation and propose to study
the legend as one unified genre according to one uni-
fied scholarly inquiry instead of the continued addi-
tion of more subcategories.
During the past years, the question of the relation-
ship between belief and legend has been raised by
many. Whichever related topic interests folklorists-
religion, belief, superstition, custom or ritual-they
inevitably end up using legends they have collected in
support of their arguments. But there is little collabo-
ration between folklorists to build upon each other's
findings. Groups of scholars work on different planes
side by side, without acknowledging each other's con-
tributions. For example, a group of four authors ex-
perimenting with the reflexive approach to belief dis-
cuss religion rather abstractedly, and not being able to
bring new insight into the discussion, end up with the
modest proposal to replace established terms with new
ones (see Western Folklore54 [1995]). Another largely
unnoticed contribution, Robin Gwyndaf's native eth-
nography provides an exemplary model, document-
ing continuity and the processes of modernisation of
traditional folk belief in Wales, from field collected
customs and legends (Gwyndaf 1994, 226-60). On the
other hand, Leea Virtanen reported, surprisingly, the
total demise of belief legends in Finland because peo-
Linda Degh
ple's mentality has changed under the influence of
modern urbanisation. According to contributors to the
Finnish Folklore Archive, electric lights have dispelled
the fear of ghosts lurking in strange places after dark
(Virtanen 1992, 225-31). An entirely different situation:
ghost stories living in everyday conversation, led to
Gillian Bennett's plea to resuscitate the terms "belief
legend/belief story" (Bennett 1989). The problem with
these, and other current discussions of belief and leg-
end, is that while authors raise important questions,
they keep restating and rephrasing what we already
know, and remain entangled in the web of termino-
logical rhetoric-arguing the salience of name-assign-
ment to legend subcategories without a logical attempt
at definition. Isn't it time to join forces and try to de-
fine the legend at long last? Isn't it time to stop specu-
lating on the many personal meanings of a qualifier
(like "contemporary") and start identifying the ele-
ments that make a legend a legend, the elements
present in all legends and absent from all other folk-
lore genres? The master concept "legend" has fallen
victim to diligent subcategory creators, and the con-
troversy over the meaning of the working title of a
subcategory is being given undue significance.
I am not going to add to the interesting, but sterile
and redundant, speculations on the term "contempo-
rary legend" triggered by Heda Jason's warning against
interpretation before collection and classification (Jason
1990, 221-3) because I have already stated my case
(Degh 1991, 17-18), and do not feel persuaded to
change my mind. In my understanding, "modern,"
"urban," or "contemporary" legend-as it was named
by the Sheffield seminarians-are all good insiders'
working titles, useful for identifying certain legends
and legend-like accounts collected from a variety of
communicative sources as they emerge and gain cur-
rency and temporary relevance to social groups within
the time frames of our collaborative efforts. Evidently,
to characterise a time-honoured genre as "contempo-
rary" is too vague, general, subjective and narrow; such
characterisation will outlive its contemporariness
within a generation, if not sooner. The interpretation
of the term is speculative, abstractedly theoretical, dif-
fering from one person to the next, while they repeat
well known characteristics attributed to the legend
proper by generations of scholars in diverse constella-
tions. This is true of the last three definitions in a re-
cent issue of Folklore:(1) a "contemporary legend" nar-
rates events which purportedly occurred within a tem-
poral horizon felt as contemporary by participants in
the narrative event" (Pettit 1995, 97); (2) "normal be-
haviour pattern and unusual action"... "Contemporary
legends sit somewhere between mundane, everyday
experiences and the extraordinary, but with an unu-
sual twist (Smith 1995, 99); and (3) "the teller has
claimed that the alleged event is contemporary with
himself or herself: that it has happened within a few
weeks or months of the date of telling" (Simpson 1995,
What Is A Belief Legend?
100). Do these authors suggest that the same story may
be called "contemporary" legend if the teller claims
that he or his father or neighbour witnessed the event,
but should be called "historical" or some other name,
if it refers to long ago or to no date? Is "contemporary
legend" characterised by narrator's time setting in it-
self? And if so, what is the scholarly benefit of creating
such a volatile category? The more suggestions are
made to keep the simplistic term "contemporary" alive,
the less convincing it becomes. There are more stable
and crucial indentification markers to acknowledge.
To return to Jason's critique, I support the "unu-
sual" Anglo-American approach to legend outside tra-
ditional peasant communities. The democratic toler-
ance in gathering, the bold and unconventional inclu-
sion of "any legend that is circulating actively"
(Brunvand 1991, 107) had never been practised in Eu-
rope before; and in spite of its obvious drawbacks, was,
and is, the only reasonable approach to living legendry.
Legend-in-the-making can be isolated only from the
assemblage of all pertinent data bearing some sem-
blance to legend or indicating the potential of becom-
ing legend-information that earlier was deemed
inauthentic, alien, fake, corrupted or rewritten. This
inclusive approach is in clear opposition to the selec-
tion of exclusively oral, "authentic" texts, a rule of the
past. Dealing with a functional, multimedia processed
and global form of folklore, we can no longer merely
apply principles grafted for the study of relatively sta-
ble, selfcontained agricultural communities.
The observation of the emerging novelty cannot wait
until analytical categories and classifications are set.
Like other traditionalist readers of Foaftale News,
Leander Petzoldt has also misunderstood the reason
for the unselective notation of non-oral legends by
Anglo-American authors. Singling out Brunvand as the
"most eager multiplicator" of stories (Petzoldt 1989,
125), Petzoldt has criticised the use of materials from
the mass media and Brunvand's monitoring of corre-
spondents in creating a legend circulating process by
professional and amateur folklorists (ibid., 26-7). Since
the time of the Grimm brothers, it has been common
knowledge that, nolens volens, folklorists stimulate and
influence the folklore they study; how can contempo-
rary legend scholars be blamed for the modem mass
media's increased demand for sensational, appealing,
titillating stories? Every shred of proto-legend is im-
portant in this polyphonic, multimedia circulation.
Credit is due Anglo-American legend scholars for dis-
covering legends on their own turf-legends produced
and sustained by and for all social classes and groups,
and for shifting the focus from the past to the present
socio-economic and political realities behind the texts.
Beyond the way legends have been collected, a differ-
ence in topics, contents, informants and audiences has
been manifested, not so much because of some racial-
ethnic Anglo-American predilection toward supernatu-
ral and horror stories, but because the technological
35
transformation of society and its effects on human life
have been symptomatically reflected most prominently
in legendry, and in America earlier than elsewhere in
the western world. This is why, following the Second
World War, similar legends began to crop up, first in
the most industrialised countries of western Europe,
then in others as modern industrialisation progressed.
When continental European scholars joined theAnglo-
American team and began to report, and later pub-
lish, their newly discovered local legends, a striking
similarity was noted. Mass media imported, borrowed,
relocated and popularised known American legends,
but beyond this, the transcontinental dissemination of
fears, uncertainties and supernatural beliefs endemic
to the alienation of modern urbanites established new
local crops of identical narratives. In other words, the
globalisation of concerns produces cultural variables
in a strikingly similar new body of international leg-
ends discovered and interpreted by the contextual
approach first in the United States. There is a definite
continuity here, as the growing number of international
researchers join the collaborative body of the Interna-
tional Society for Contemporary Legend Research and
publish their homegrown versions.
Belief
"Belief legend" as a term has a long history. It hails
back to the first folklore empiricist's observation of
informal conversations of European villagers on the
occasion of legend telling. Looking for prose narratives
other than the intensively studied magic tale, scholars
soon realised that the legend, more than any other folk-
lore genre, is ideology sensitive, rooted in the local
system of folk belief. Therefore, the visiting investiga-
tor-often native ethnographers-could best observe,
identify and describe legends at casual community
gatherings where beliefs were sure to be a topic of con-
versation. It was also found that legend does not have
its own reserved occasion for performance as do artis-
tic entertainments such as tale- or joke-telling, ballad-
singing, dancing and mumming; there are no planned
"legend sessions," only unpredictable, spontaneous
tellings. Thus, direct questioning of chosen individu-
als to solicit legends leads nowhere. Friedrich Ranke
was a pioneer in speaking about the "Biologie der
Volkssagen" in 1926. He felt the need to relate living
legendry to the ruling belief system, the locally forged
ideology of folk religion, to understand its place in eve-
ryday village life. But he was convinced that the tell-
er's positive belief in the truth of the legend, not the
desire to submit his viewpoint to public discussion as
we have found, was the essence of the genre.
It is common knowledge that the human being is,
by nature, a homo religiosus, who by compulsion con-
structs personal variables of the established Church
canon in which he or she has been indoctrinated by
public education. It is also common knowledge that
36
religion is socially constructed as people interact with
family members, friends, and acquaintances: "they
learn to see the world from the vantage point of those
particular interactions," as social psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi has observed (Csikszentmihalyi 1993,
59). Following Ranke, collectors of village narrative rep-
ertoires-Otto Brinkmann, Gottfried Henssen, Matthias
Zender (Brinkmann 1933; Zender 1935; Henssen 1955)
and others in the 1930s and 40s-explored manifesta-
tions of underlying belief commonly condescendingly
conceptualised by most academic folklorists as "super-
stition." In fact, the discovery and scientific analysis of
belief-related narratives by Ranke's followers contra-
dicted the overall practice of abstracting formally simi-
lar items of "superstition" from field collections of leg-
ends, and to order and classify them for local, regional,
national and international indexes and encyclopaedias,
irrespective of their diverse cultural meanings and func-
tions. Such sourcebooks and indexes are too numerous
to list; it will suffice to mention the oft quoted giant,
the ten-volume Handworterbuch des deutschen Aber-
glaubens (1927-42), by the Swiss, Hanns Bachtold-
Staubli.
In the United States, the collection of superstitions
was second only to that of ballads; these were the two
areas most popular with pioneer folklorists. The col-
lection of "Popular Beliefs and Superstitions" in Frank
C. Brown's North CarolinaFolklore(Vols 6 and 7, 1961
and 1964) was a model for the first generation of Ameri-
can academic folklorists. Local archives stored such
collections. In the spirit of the German philological
school, Wayland Hand spent a lifetime excerpting, clip-
ping and mounting belief items on 3 x 5 cards, creating
categories for an encyclopaedia of "American popular
beliefs and superstitions," without theoretical clarifi-
cation to justify distinction between belief and super-
stition. These terms are still used as synonyms in folk-
lorists' parlance. Generations of students learned the
skill of reducing elaborate legends to their skeletal es-
sence, giving only the experienced fieldworker an idea
of what precious materials had been lost. But if a study
of "belief" was the purpose of collecting, not only was
belief detached from its social world by the deliberate
destruction of the text told by individuals, but the re-
moval of the indicators of its cultural, temporal and
social context resulted in unspecific, indistinct, human
universals, useful at best for the grist-mill of the psy-
choanalyst in search of general functions of the mind.
Evidently, "belief" cannot be collected, only conjec-
tured by the culturally alien scholar. Belief is invisible,
inaudible, part of local cultural heritage hidden behind
acts and narratives. It lives in the minds, not on the lips
of people; it is a convention, inherited and tacitly shared
by a community's membership, composed of individu-
als who participate in shaping and internalising the
belief. Everyone in village X knows that one should not
pick up a rag or a horseshoe or a matchbox if it lies on
a crossroads, because it may have been placed there to
Linda Degh
confer a curse; that frogs should be avoided as poten-
tial witch familiars and that the handler may get warts
by touching them. This common understanding need
not be stated. It is in latent memory storage until an
actual event calls it back to life; when harm is done,
countermeasures must be taken. A hex sign attracts only
the stranger's attention, not the native's. When folklor-
ist Carla Bianco showed me the Rome market where
her mother used to buy foodstuffs, she pointed out the
horn suspended from the top of the booths. "Tell us,
what is this for?" she asked a vendor who was busy
slicing prosciutto with a sharp knife. "Don't you know?"
the woman glared at her with deep disgust-she had
known two generations of Carla's family. The native
folklorist had to explain that she had asked only for
my enlightenment because it would be more convinc-
ing if I heard it from "the folk." This is how I received
an authentic instruction about the jettatura (evil eye).
For the uninformed folklorist, the only way to dis-
cern underlying belief is to participate in community
life and to look for manifest forms in daily activities.
This way it is easy to identify belief behind the elabo-
rate performance of magic and the pertaining narra-
tive account that may be verbalised in the form of leg-
end or magic tale.
Speaking of belief as traditionally developed ideol-
ogy, reference can be made to Csikszentmihalyi's un-
derstanding of the evolutionary history of humans'
extrasomatic storage of information contained in the
folklore of our ancestors:
Legends [he writes] encapsulated centuries of useful
experiencein a few rhymedlines, proverbs,or caution-
ary tales. The young members of the tribe no longer
had to learnonly fromtheirown experienceswhat was
dangerousand what was valuablein theirenvironment,
instead, they could rely on the collective memory of
past generations, and possibly avoid repeating their
mistakes.Theknowledge helped them to achieve a cer-
tain amount of controlover the environment.[Further-
more, he continues] Legends did not just convey use-
ful information they also passed on an enormous
amount of irrelevantdetails, or details that make sense
only in certainspecific historicalsituations.This is in-
evitable because anyone who wants to pass on a per-
sonally experienced truth usually cannot distinguish
the essential element of that truth from its incidental
features (Csikszentmihalyi1993, 57-8).
But I see these seemingly irrelevant details as flexible
enough to become crucial in furthering the legend proc-
ess that authorises transmitters to switch focus and
promote incidental and irrelevant details to the essen-
tial, and demote essentials into inessential obscurity, in
response to both social change and personal creativity.
Fieldworkers are in a difficult position as they delve
into the mentality of a local community. They have to
rely on earlier collectors' information preserved in pro-
fessional archives and literary sources, most of which
are incomplete and biased, unlikely to meet the high
What Is A Belief Legend? 37

standards of accuracy required by modern folklore none of which showed any resemblance to what we
scholarship. At best, old files can give us a general idea had heard. She honestly tried but could not give an
about folklife, and highlight some prominent stories or account of her recital. All my efforts failed; I never heard
customs that might be explored, and open the way to it again from anyone else, and even local folklorist
discovering more complete variants. But it is a frus- Adam Sebestyen could not explain this magic chant,
trating experience that, by following the rules of sys- informed by belief.
tematic fieldwork approach, folklorists end up by col- If we speak of "belief" in the meaning of the folklor-
lecting the variants of the already known, without find- ist, as a disposition, as an underlying mental attitude
ing what remained hidden, because the unanticipated, or behavioural pattern that manifests in audibly or vis-
the unexpected, the not-yet-known keeps escaping at- ibly observable texts as generic ingredients of a belief
tention. Unless an accidental occurrence brings them system, amounting to a (local or subcultural) religion,
in touch with an emergent manifestation of belief, folk- we can also relate these beliefs to pertinent legend types,
lorists row their boats on familiar waters towards pre- like motifs to pertinent types. But before we can speak
dictable destinations. about belief in relationship to legend, we have to make
A particular event made me realise how hard it is to it clear that we mean here religious belief, not general
learn about the unknown. At the time I was working belief. General belief is understood as trust in the ve-
on the first edition of my book Folktalesand Societywhich racity of someone's information, "as disposition to re-
was to be published in the folklore series of the Institut spond in certain ways when the appropriate issue arises,
fur deutsche Volkskundein Berlin. The Institute's direc- like our belief in the dependability of our neighborhood
tor, Wolfgang Steinitz, distinguished folklorist and spe- cobbler" (Quine and Ullian 1970, 49). There are many
cialist in Finno-Ugric, Slavic and German linguistics, definitions of homo religiosus, the holder of theological
accompanied me to the village of Kakasd, the settle- belief: belief in the existence of God, immortality of the
ment of ethnic Szekelys from the Bucovina which I in- soul and moral government of the world, and the seeker
vestigated in the book. It was an unusually hot late of salvation by faith, trust and obedience (Bellah 1970,
spring, without any rain. The dry soil was hard to break 4). Religion is related to the condition that humans live
up for planting, and people feared crop failure. Along in uncertainty because they cannot fully know and com-
with two other folklorists, we arrived at the house of prehend the world around them, live in social relation-
the Andrasfalvis. Uncle Gyuri, the storyteller, was in- ships that limit their natural instincts, and are left to
side, while his wife, village comedian Erzsi Matyi, bus- digest their own unanswered questions (Dux 1982, 158).
ied herself trying to plant onions in the arid soil of the But we also have to speak of homo sapiens: it is equally
backyard vegetable patch. As we went through the as normal for humans to seek scientific knowledge by
kitchen door to greet her, a flock of clouds gathered exploring observable regularities of cause and effect in
above us, causing a sudden downpour. What we saw the real world.
made us stop in awe. The rain filled the cracks of the The two kinds of beliefs were identified by folklor-
dry soil as the planting woman buried the onion seed- ists as the kernels of two separate legend categories:
lings with the handle of an axe. One by one, she started Glauben- and Wissensagen (belief and knowledge leg-
to draw a circle with her index finger around each, flex- ends) (Rohrich 1958, 665) that is, memorates and
ing her knees and bowing in slow rhythm, almost touch- chronikates (von Sydow 1948, 87), to characterise leg-
ing the ground with her head while chanting a monoto- ends about supernatural encounters as opposed to leg-
nous, wailing pentatonic prayer with a refrain, "O Holy ends about real historical events and heroes. These
Virgin, Mother of God." She seemed to be in a trance, neatly balanced categories devised in the tobacco and
not noticing us while she performed, tearfully suppli- caffeine scented armchair of scholars, far from the field,
cating the divine powers. We realised we were eyewit- have failed to work because it is impossible to deter-
nesses to a ritual rainmaking ceremony that outsiders mine categories on the grounds of whether their claim
never see. We stood there, frustrated, totally unpre- is belief or knowledge,
imaginary or factual, because
pared, without a tape recorder or a camera to capture all legendry is rooted in the domain of extranormal,
the performance, watching the numinous moment un- metaphysical ideology. Even the
seemingly rational
wittingly experienced. It was only a brief episode; the horror stories contain coincidences of irrational, super-
rain stopped, and we retreated into the kitchen to dry natural dimensions, and the so-called historical
legends
ourselves. Regaining her composure, Erzsi returned have no valid historical sources. These stories were
from the yard and cheerfully greeted us, offering re- lifted from their historical context and relocated into
freshments. Casually, I mentioned that we saw her an anachronistic and mythical environment. Neverthe-
planting and singing something that we did not hear less, the juxtaposition of belief and knowledge, religion
clearly, would she please tell us? "What did I mean?" and science, turned out to be productive in dealing with
she asked in return. "Didn't I know all of her songs the growing body of
legendry in the technological age.
already?" "Not this," I insisted. "Could she repeat it?" Indeed, during the last decades, the world has been
"O that," she said, "that was a hymn from the hymnal, inundated by a
staggering body of mass media treated
nothing special." And she started to recite three hymns, legendry based on supernatural or extranormal belief
38
claiming to be cleared and authenticated by scientific
research and knowledge. With daily appearances on
TV, radio and in the printed media, spokespersons of
pseudo-scientific and scientific establishments have
gained tremendous popularity and have contributed
to an unprecedented boom of traditional religious be-
lief. If prestigious authorities-like Harvard psychia-
try professor John E. Mack-become serious about UFO
aliens (Willwerth 1994), they are actually joining theo-
logians in the assertion of the popular spiritualist be-
lief in guardian angels among us and are lending a hand
to the evolution of a new complex of age-old traditional
legendry. Likewise, the latest, but now declining, chap-
ter of American satanic conspiracy legendry consistent
with the Christian Church doctrine was supported by
theologians as much as by learned health profession-
als, psychiatrists and psychologists. In consideration
of the scientification of religious belief through the in-
stitutionalisation of legends by the so-called occult or
borderline sciences, as well as by religious establish-
ments and cults focusing on the practice and spread of
distinct kinds of belief phenomena, it becomes neces-
sary to deal with the semblance of dichotomy between
religion and science in the thinking and behaviour of
people when they tell, listen, and react to hearing leg-
ends, and as they form groups and develop ritualised
practices. As the two kinds of beliefs are intimately re-
lated, often inseparably intertwined, confused, and in
conflict with each other, belief-any degree thereof be-
tween positive and negative extremes-becomes the
lifeline of legend communication. The controversy be-
tween these two worldviews is the trademark of the
legend; it emerges from the natural human uncertainty
about the nature of things which both science and reli-
gion try to resolve.
Nobel-prize-winning physiologist, Robert W. Holley,
said that, "Religion deals with the 'unknowable,' sci-
ence with the 'knowable.' Conflicts arise when people
think something that has been 'unknowable' has be-
come 'knowable"' (Holley 1992, 179). Questioned about
his thoughts of the concept of God and the existence of
God, Holley answered:
I consider the existence of God as "unknowable,"and
thereforepart of one's religious view. There is a great
deal to marvel or wonder about in the universe.
Whetherone wants to attributethe marvelous things
to the existenceof God depends upon one's natureand
experience.Such a belief appeals to some people and
not to others. Since it is unknowable,I think it should
be a very personal matter(Holley 1992, 180).
I hope I have made my position clear: any legend
researcher needs to focus on the attitude towards be-
lief expressed by individual participants in the legend
process to gain insight into the dialectics by means of
which believability, the purpose of any legend commu-
nication, are debated.
Speaking about belief as the core ingredient of leg-
end, I do not mean unspecific, general, informal con-
versations about life and death and the beyond, that
Linda Degh
may be called in a general and unspecified way "reli-
gious" by ethnographic observers. The currently mod-
ish reflexive interviewing and description in the field
may have its virtues as an attempt to reduce biased
judgment of data rather than looking down at the sub-
ject from the researcher's ivory tower. David Hufford
is correct in noticing "serious inadequacies in the study
of belief," but what he and his co-authors offer does
not "help such reform" (Hufford 1995, 3). On the con-
trary, they add more inadequacies. While promoting
cultural relativism, these folklorists become more con-
cered with their own reaction to encountering research
subjects than with the belief they were supposed to
study, and end up presenting ethnography of them-
selves and their own speculations. While they are criti-
cal or ignorant of what others have done, all authors
except William A. Wilson speak about folk belief or re-
ligion abstractedly, not in data-based concrete terms
(Wilson 1995, 13-22). Time after time, they forget what
questions they promised to address, and explicate their
own opinion of what folklorists do wrong. For exam-
ple, making the charge that folklorists "maintained an
extremely problematical terminology and conceptual-
isation of the religion they study," Leonard Primiano
does not offer another conceptualisation; he merely
proposes to replace the term "folk religion" with "ver-
nacular religion" to remedy a "scholarly misrepresen-
tation" (Primiano 1995, 36-52).
This style of reflexive approach does not eliminate
the "us, the rational scholars; they, the believing folk"
conflict typical in interviewer-interviewee relationships,
but allows unrestricted discussion of general methodo-
logical problems, blurring the intended focus.
I do not feel it safe to rely on my own instincts and
speculations about the substance and nature of belief
in a community. Rather,I accept the commonsense guid-
ance of existing conditions and describe observed
events from the viewpoints of the community's repre-
sentative individuals. Every community is a universe
in itself, the vantage point from which the outside world
is being judged. To quote Csikszentmihalyi again:
Cultures can inculcate their values and worldviews.
Most human groups believe that they are the chosen
people, situated at the centerof the universe. They be-
lieve that their understandingof the world is the only
one that makes sense (Csikszentmihalyi1993,59).
The religious ideology, worldview, principles and
concepts of faith, worship, piety, and rules of morality
and sociability of western society were established and
are still dominated by the Christian Church. From the
early Middle Ages on, the Church has set the rules of
education, law and governance. Society has been
shaped by religious institutions, and in the course of
time struggles for power and dominance have split up
the one and only Christian Church into innumerable
denominations. Ritual practices and legendry have nev-
ertheless continually reinforced underlying belief
throughout the western world including Europe and
What Is A Belief Legend?
North America. The same legends have persisted from
the early MiddleAges up to this day. The parallel preva-
lence of identical legends in literary, legal, theological,
historical, medical and geographical documents and in
ongoing oral tradition shows the tenacity of these sto-
ries. Variation in the basic plots are reasonable adjust-
ments to environmental and ideological changes that
enable them to stay relevant and survive. Modern leg-
ends still are based on Christian education according
to the Bible, which remains the basic source of knowl-
edge and belief on all levels, irrespective of denomina-
tion or personal choices in western society. This knowl-
edge admits the pious, the unbeliever and the sceptic
to a homogeneous cultural platform that enables eve-
ryone to participate in rites of passage and calendar
festivals, to appreciate arts and literature, to distinguish
right from wrong, and to cope with the notion of mor-
tality. If we want to study the legends of the members
of a community, we have to define their interpretation
of belief as they define it comparatively with the ca-
nonic religion from which it was derived.
Folklorists regarded belief manifested in legends as
some sort of archaism, a primitive worldview, an un-
critical, naive scientific interpretation of observed real-
ity. As outsiders, they surveyed legend telling commu-
nities with an air of superiority, assuming that the nar-
rators of these absurd stories (in which average peo-
ple, not epic heroes, experience supernormal or absurd
encounters without leaving the landscape and climate
of ordinary life) must believe what they narrate. Schol-
ars were puzzled by the peculiarities of the legend, so
different from the magic tale in which the hero is the
only real person representing our point of view, sur-
rounded by, and related to, irrational landscapes, peo-
ple, animals and objects as featured by Liithi's
Allverbundenheitconcept (Liithi 1975, 330). This contras-
tive conceptualisation of reality in legend and tale was
convincingly introduced in Lutz R6hrich's classic book
Mdrchen und Wirklichkeit(R6hrich 1974) arguing that
identical narrative motifs are elastic enough to accom-
modate the message of both genres. But folklorists have
been slow to recognise that the painstaking, factual
depiction of the situation serves the purpose of authen-
ticating the narrative. As an essential stylistic feature
of the legend it serves the purpose of its telling. The
elaboration of details erroneously convinced early
fieldworkers that tellers and listeners truly believe the
legend they tell. Narrators were expected to articulate
vestiges of the belief system of an archaic pan-animis-
tic world; any scholars judged narrators' hesitation in
admitting personal experience as evidence of the ero-
sion of archaic values and the demise of folklore. And
because Ranke convinced his followers that positive
belief is the essence of legends, collectors routinely
asked their informants whether they believed what they
had just recited. What an arrogant, condescending defi-
nition was the one crafted first by Ranke in 1925, that
legends are, "popular, objectively untrue fantasy sto-
ries told for true and presented in the simple style of
39
an experience report" (Ranke 1925, 4). How can the
visting scholar know what is objectively true or untrue
and for whom, and whether the contextualisation of
the content means "telling for true," when identical leg-
ends may contain other tellers' doubts or disbeliefs?
This authoritative definition, based on archaic village
research, still persists among contemporary legend
scholars whose informants (not ignorant folk anymore)
may be as well educated as they are. We should be
aware that the religion-based stock of supernatural be-
lief is stronger than the power of enlightenment and
dominates today's emergent legendry as much as ever,
and is shared by bearers of all social, educational and
economic classes.
Why do folklore collectors (not mental health carers)
insist on asking, "Do you believe it? Is it true?" The
question itself provokes distortion. In the first place,
belief is fluctuating, hesitant and selective, not consist-
ent or absolute. In the second place, the informant has
many reasons not to tell what he or she really believes.
Even with the best intentions, the given conditions, re-
lationships, personality features and momentary dis-
positions make any disclosure of belief/ disbelief/ hesi-
tation improvised and insincere, therefore useless for
research. The fluctuating mental states of tellers and
responsive audiences can be discerned from the spon-
taneous performance, without asking embarrassing
personal questions impossible to answer (Becker and
Geer 1957, 28-32).
Here is an example to illuminate the complexity of
contradictions in the presentation of a legend. It reveals
the uncertainties surrounding legend experience, the
experiencer's need to try interpretations and resolve
troubling questions.
This story, known throughout Indiana, often told in
conjunction with visits to Wayne Pruitt's grave in the
Orange County cemetery south of Bedford (see
Clements 1969, 90-6), provokes the ambiguous feelings
of the presenter characteristic of natural legend telling.
"Did you hear about the chain in Prospect, Indiana?
Again, I don't know all the details, 'cause I don't really
pay attention to these stories (laughter)but ... 'cause
they tend to spook me (laughter), so I kinda ignore
them. Again, I'm not sure how many years ago this
was, ... a while ago but this man was accused for kill-
ing his wife, stranglingher with a chain. And, I don't
believe he was actually convicted of the crime but he
died beforehis innocencecould be proven.And on his
deathbedhe supposedly told someone in testimony to
his innocence that this tombstone, ... there would ap-
pear a chain in the shape of a crossthat would join link
by link.And anyway,this chain did appearand it came
on the side of the tombstone and ... where it would
cross. And lots of people made the trip to see it. And
aftera while vandals got to it, you know, and they had
to replacethe tombstone,...entirely.And now the chain
is there on this new tombstone also. And this one, my
friends took me up there to see and I actually saw the
links on the stone. Now, I don't know if the ... comes
back but they told me they do if you stay all night.
 40
And there is also anotherstory ... that some profes-
sors fromI.U. has gone to see this. And I'm sure this is
total fabrication.But when they went to look at the
tombstoneto make sure that nobody has taken a chain
and pounded it into the stone, or,you know, to alter it
in some way. And they could not find any evidence
thatthis would happen.And therewas one personwho
totallybelieved in this, the spirit coming back, and an-
other one said this is just the doing of anotherprank-
ster. And as they were leaving Prospect, as the road
winds down backwards,and as they were driving,this
carcameout of nowherebehindthem,and it was speed-
ing up, and came closer,and closer,and run them off
the road.And this personwho did not believe, this one
was driving the car.And when they found the car,the
person who did believe in the story was totally unin-
jured,and the personwho did not, was dead.And there
was a logging chain wrapped aroundhis neck. So ...
Here the story ends, accompanied by lots of nervous
laughter from the audience of some forty students. The
narrator was Debbie, a twenty-one-year old journal-
ism major at Harper Residence Hall on the Bloomington
campus, 31 October 1989. This legend consists of three
parts: the introductory personal statement, and two
selfcontained legends interlinked to illustrate the su-
periority of religious belief over knowledge. The first
story, a fabulate, is appended by a didactic memorate.
The innocently accused man is exonerated by divine
intervention which makes a miraculous sign appear on
the gravestone, but the sign is ridiculed and destroyed
by unbelievers. The raconteuse begins with an apology
for her scanty knowledge of the account. The formu-
laic modesty, however, means also that she does not
want to be identified as gullible, attracted to "these sto-
ries"; she is aware of the fact that public opinion does
not condone supernatural belief. Her apology is under-
scored by her nervous giggle as she admits that not
paying attention does not mean that she ignores these
stories. On the contrary, she is scared of them because
they spook her. After this presentation of ambiguity,
she puts the main story at a distance, in a depersonal-
ised manner as if she were trying to recall the details
told to her by an unnamed person. She even uses the
word "supposedly" when telling about the testimonial
appearance of the chain on the tombstone as evidence
that the man had been innocently accused. Describing
graphically the formation of the chain "in the shape of
a cross"-a known motif of an exemplummirabilis-she
argues for its veracity by reference to "lots of people
(who) made the trip to see it," as pilgrimages to a lat-
ter-day saint's shrine, similar to the legend trip of young
people in anticipation of a supernatural manifestation.
A new episode reports the miraculous reappearance of
the cross on a newly erected tombstone after the origi-
nal had been destroyed by vandals. Here, the tone of
the rhetoric of the legend changes from fabulate to
memorate. The narrator saw the new chain on the new
tombstone because her friends took her there. This time
she did not refuse to pay attention: "I actually saw the
links," she tells us, turning herself into a voluntary eye-
Linda Degh
witness. But again, she hesitates to say if the chain is
still there and refers to others who told her that "it
comes back if you stay all night." She does not say it,
but it is implied that the chain appears in similar cases,
when visitors perform certain rituals. The second leg-
end confirms the miracle story of the innocently accused
man and warns against the profaning of divine justice,
although, right at the beginning, the narrator indicates
her own disbelief by interjecting, "I'm sure this is total
fabrication," confusing her audience about the point
she is making. This memorate is a didactic story about
the victory of religion over science. Some rationalised
(negative) variants of this legend attribute the appear-
ance of the chain to the softness of Indiana limestone to
prove scientifically that no divine interference has oc-
curred-someone just threw a heavy iron chain on the
grave marker and that made the dent. As I was in-
formed by authorities in the stone industry, this is a
pseudo-scientific belief statement (an "anti-legend")
because not even the soft oolite can be dented this way.
In this story, a religious person and a sceptical scientist
investigate the cause of the miracle. The one who does
not believe trivialises it as prankster's trick with a chain,
and is punished by strangulation with a chain (does
the mobile chain on the grave marker perform the ex-
ecution?), after a phantom car runs their car off the road
as they are departing. The scientist who believes was
"totally uninjured" "when they found the car."
Seventeen legends were told that night, inspired by
my talk, the hot apple cider, candlelight, pumpkin pie
and spooky paraphernalia. After the people began to
trade stories, I did not utter a sound nor did the two
graduate folklore students who came along. This vari-
ant illustrates the religious nature of underlying belief
and the ambiguous attitude narrators express in accord-
ance with legend dialectics. Compared to other re-
corded variants of this legend, it also illustrates the
uniqueness of the meaning of each variant. In this case,
the last part, the punishment of the agnostic professor
adds a new and strong warning against disbelief.
Legend and Belief
Now it is time to return to the concept "belief legend"
as it was defined by folklorists at a time when distinc-
tion had to be made between the two basic narrative
genres-the legend, referred to as "true story" by na-
tive European villagers; and the Mdrchen, what they
called "a lie" in appreciation of the creative fantasy of
tale tellers. That was the time when practising
fieldworkers and comparative text philologists realised
that both genres are based on a common belief system,
a common monotheistic cultural knowledge, as is con-
vincingly documented by Stith Thompson's Motif In-
dex. The motifs, the smallest components of traditional
narratives-E334.2. Ghost haunts burial spot; E384 Ghost
summonedby music; G269.5. Witch causes hauntedhouses,
and so on-can be regarded also as statements of be-
lief, expression of worldview, charged attitudes and op-
What Is A Belief Legend?
positions between fantasy and reality, the knowable and
unknowable, life and death. It was no absurdity when
legend scholars proposed to apply the MotifIndex num-
bers for legend classification.
While "lie" translates as fiction, "truth" does not
necessarily mean that people believe the legends they
tell, but rather that legends are about what real people
experience within their own topographically delimited
territory in the real world. The real world is the refer-
ent of the legend. It is presented before the legend event
begins and after it has ended; life is restored to ordi-
nariness. Ordinary landscapes, ordinary people are fea-
tured, engaged in their daily routines when, according
to theologian Rudolf Otto (Otto 1958), the sudden in-
trusion of the ganz andere,the numinous, the tremendum
and the fascinans as a religious experience occurs and
transforms the world of experiencers for a moment.
That moment is the encounter of the mortal and the
immortal, the rational and the irrational, as folklore
theorists Gotthilf Isler, Max Liithi, Gerhard Heilfurth,
Hermann Bausinger and others have asserted.
The incorporation of legend motifs, or full legends,
into magic tales, and the transformation of legends into
tales and tales into legends, appears as ideological
recastings, connecting and contrasting the objectified
fictitious world of the tale with the real, supernatural
realm of everyday. In a tale, a real person (like us) makes
a labour contract and performs chores in an extranormal
world-the lowly hero tends and grooms the horses of
the seven headed dragon up on the top of the sky-high
tree (AT 468)-just as would be expected from the vil-
lage horseherd.
During my student years in the field, I learned that
villagers considered legends as information about ex-
perienced human encounters with the supernatural
world, in opposition to the general opinion of academic
folklorists that these "superstitious stories" are based
on erroneous beliefs that characterise the separate real-
ity of backward villagers. Some proposed using the
native term "true story," general among European
peasantries (Dobos 1978); other proposals included the
use of the vague term "traditions" or "folk-talks," or
"folk-conversations," stressing the informality of their
telling (Hegediis 1946; 1952). References were made to
men's evening gatherings in the pub, at homes or com-
munal workplaces, where general conversation brought
up a miscellany of legend-like stories. The terms "be-
liefs and belief stories" were also used to identify su-
pernatural scary stories popular in rural and urban cir-
cles (Dobos 1986, 170-90).
During the early 1960s, when I became interested in
the legend, I accepted the term "belief story" or "belief
legend" as suggested by Aurel Vajkai (Vajkai 1947, 55-
69) in his superb description of the legend cycle of herds-
men of the Bakony woods region. Herding, an impor-
tant, hereditary trade, gave privileges and respect to
herdsmen, ranking high above agriculturalists. As the
story goes, the herdsmen made pacts with the Devil in
order to perfect their herding skills and to make them-
41
selves indispensable to their employers (Degh 1965b,
231-8 and 335-7). As outdoor men, living in nature all
the year round, they were recognised "folk-scientists,
healers and philosophers" as well as eminent tellers of
legends. Vajkai's "belief stories" were first- and second-
hand personal experience accounts. He pointed out that
belief had created and integrated the whole cycle of
narratives that gained popularity both in its entirety
and in its parts. He saw nothing accidental in the fact
that this fusion of belief and personal experience made
a strong core of unity to shape the episodes of the story.
Frequent repetition, elaboration of details, and person-
alisation stabilised the texts like those of popular bal-
lads or tales. He was dealing with widespread pres-
tige-promoting stories of competing clans of herdsmen,
stories that displayed the content stability of fabulates
while maintaining the personalisation of memorates.
The idea "belief story" or "belief legend" was appeal-
ing to me because eighty per cent of Hungarian folk
legendry fitted the category known as mythical or
demonological (see Hand 1965) or supernatural. In my
earlier works, I used this term also to describe less sta-
ble, less coherent, fragmentary variants. In fact, I also
applied the term to episodes or motifs, with or without
narrative elements, that appeared in independent us-
age in my experience, because they also were compos-
ite parts of a complex of which the analytical category
of a legend type could be pieced together (Degh 1965a;
1971).
This was the era when members of the European
legend commission discussed the classifiability of leg-
ends. Realising that the same story had only a handful
of relatively stable, complete, elaborate and coherent
versions and that the rest-hundreds or thousands-
exist and function in what the outsider may see as in-
coherent bits and pieces, they soon gave up trying to
create a typology. Fieldworkers should have realised
that functional documents of living culture are harder
to pin down than the appealing, but petrified, skeletons
of the past, and that to explore the extent of the legend
as a specific genre, they need to turn to the present
dynamics of emergent bits and pieces of legendry
shaped by innovative bearers of tradition. But instead
of starting in-depth field observation of legend proc-
esses to find characteristics that truly distinguish the
genre from other folklore genres, they looked for those
that dissociate legend from legend. Subcategories were
identified, names assigned to each, according to diverse
esoteric and exoteric organising principles and
worldviews, based on one arbitrarily chosen feature
judged as prominent in disregard of others. For exam-
ple, the legend about the chain on the tombstone quoted
above could be identified arbitrarily as contemporary
legend, cemetery legend, ghost story, adolescent leg-
end, religious legend, and memorate with equal justifi-
cation. Would this mean that the variants of the same
legend need to be placed in separate categories?
Whoever found a handful of legends in the library
or among a group of schoolchildren proposed a new
42
name that characterised more the investigator's than
the bearer's interest. The hairsplitting exercise of dis-
criminating between categories and subcategories, as-
signing names, and determining "analytical categories"
began early and is still going on, as if modern authors
would be persuaded to invent new terms for their new
collections in line with the fashionable trends of other
disciplines. New terms are also a risky business because
they often turn out to be the reinvention of the wheel.
Confusion and chaos is created by the many terms be-
cause: 1) they pertain, not only to the complete narra-
tive, but to its close kin, parts and ingredients; 2) the
terms often are synonyms not easily translatable into
English from the language of their origin; and 3) no
distinction is made between heuristic, operational and
temporarily useful, and more stable naming. Beyond
that, titles may be assigned by scholars or by the bear-
ers and can indicate topic, content, main character, the
witness, style, mood, place, time, or purpose of telling.
Robin Gwyndaf's listing of superstition categories A
to J (227-8) confirms Leopold Schmidt's observation
that "the domain of the legend is as large as the totality
of folk culture, one can say no part of it, from settle-
ment and house, to proverb and saying exist wihtout
being touched also by the legend" (Schmidt 1963, 107).
In agreement with Gillian Bennett that the prolifera-
tion of contradictory usage of terminology has lately
increased the confusion surrounding the genre (Bennett
1989, 291), I feel it is time to stop seeking more legend
subspecies or potential legend ingredients, because
doing so undermines the likelihood of an agreeable
compromise. Collaborative effort is needed to find the
common denominator that makes legend a legend,
whether it be long, short, fragmentary, demonic, horri-
ble, disgusting, comic, grotesque, entertaining, first or
third person, rural, urban, oral or printed, believed or
not believed.
Bennett, the most original and prolific representa-
tive of the contemporary legend avant garde, has a
strong record in field observation and analysis of su-
pernatural belief-related legendry. Indeed, there are
some interesting ideas in her essay, as she reminds us
of many modes of conversing about community beliefs.
I am pleased that she mentions certain legends (or
memorates and other legend-like accounts) that are
implicitly belief-oriented, told in the context of "the
discussion of a cultural belief complex," and that func-
tion as "the exploration of that complex" (ibid., 301). I
wholeheartedly agree with her; several of my articles
have described the legend as a conversational genre in
which participants (proponents) state and debate the
nature of their belief in the account. The difference be-
tween us is only that I do not see a need to distinguish
"belief story" or "belief legend" from the rest of
legendry, because the exploration of believability is
present in all legends since it constitutes the essential
purpose of the genre. The legend-telling conversation,
as Bennett correctly states, is informal, often fuzzy, be-
cause it is a spontaneous occurrence not prepared like
Linda Degh
a storytelling occasion for a featured narrator, as
Bennett's transcript also indicates. However, the inter-
view-style case study-the transcript of a thirty minute
classroom legend telling of six fifteen-year-old young-
sters-is not produced in the relaxed gathering when
the proper, sub-logical atmosphere can develop and
lead to spontaneous reflections and conversation about
supernatural experiences. The interviewer-prompted,
artificially staged speedy recital of twenty-five items
distorts reality and is unfit for scientific scrutiny. It does
not support the renaming proposal nor Bennett's con-
clusion; the fact that these items are also legends has
been accepted by most legend specialists. The materi-
als presented are ghost stories; that is, classic legends
whose popularity fluctuates over time but whose con-
tents constitute the majority of the current legend rep-
ertoire of Americans. They give testimony to the cur-
rent intensification of religious belief. However, to de-
pend on schoolchildren's stories to make a general theo-
retical proposition is misleading. For too long it has been
an academic practice of American folklorists to collect
legends from students-mostly college age-in their
classes or to assign graduate students to collect legends
from college, high school or grade school children. Our
archives are predominantly filled by young people's
first- or second-hand legends. I do not dispute that stu-
dent groups as occupational-, gender- and age-groups
develop their own legend repertoires (see Grider 1976;
Tucker 1977), but the lack of collecting from adults re-
inforces the misconception that legends, particularly
ghost and horror stories, are the critical genre of chil-
dren and adolescents, and distorts the fact that there is
a largely untapped body of legendry circulating among
adults who actually enculturate their children into the
legend culture.2The interview-produced conversational
legends in Bennett's transcript could have been col-
lected from more articulate adults; more natural leg-
end exchange would be more convincing for generali-
sation about legend and belief.
Contemporary legend students can gain from read-
ing and rereading the works of earlier authors and
evaluate them according to their chronological signifi-
cance. We have a brilliant and enthusiastic international
team of researchers, capable of measuring the devel-
opmental trajectory of legend scholarship, sorting out
the dated and resolved problems, finding and revital-
ising valuable ideas that have remained unnoticed on
library shelves. It is time to reverse the work order: we
need more data gathering before we can build a con-
vincing legend theory. Much can be learned from the
history of legend study, particularly because it devel-
oped in close collaboration among specialists as the
original literary-philological interest transformed into
a sociologically based study of personal creativity.
The term "belief legend/story" first appeared as a
heuristic, not as a theoretically established, term. Fol-
lowing Vajkai, Dagmar Klimova, Jaromir Jech, C.V.
istov, Brynjulf Alver and Otto Blehr submitted their
interpretations of the term at the Liblice meeting of the
What Is A Belief Legend?
legend commission of the International Society for Folk
Narrative Research (ISFNR) (see Fabula9 [1967]). Along
with other commentators, they identified oral prose
narratives in the field and attempted to describe and
explain the relationship between communal and per-
sonal variants of identical contents and their potential
transgeneric affinities. Andre Jolles's original "einfache
Formen" (Jolles 1930) idea triggered this interest, most
fruitful in documenting the transitional nature of liv-
ing oral tradition (as discussed by Bausinger [1980, 225-
36]), and in forming legend-related expressions such
as belief concepts, rumours, reports, cases, experience
stories, pseudo-legends, anecdotes, horror stories, and
so on. It seems impossible to stop collectors from nam-
ing their items as they see it fit; and I would say, let
them do it. It is only the comparative analyst who must
find the proper place for the piece someone somewhere
informally named, and who is not obliged to take such
label seriously, in the grand scheme of things.
Bennett's proposition concerning "belief-related gen-
res" follows the suggestion of the reclusive Norwegian
folklorist Otto Blehr who distinguished "belief story"
from "belief legend" (Blehr 1967, 259-63). Seven years
later, Bleir published a book, elaborating further the
distinction between belief legend and belief story, a dif-
ference that does not deviate from von Sydow's dis-
tinction between the depersonalised fabulate and the
ego-centred memorate (Blehr 1974). The merit of Blehr's
book lies, not in making this distinction, but rather in
his excellent fieldwork, his model recording of a treas-
ury of legends of a community and, above all, his in-
terpretation of local folk belief as religion, showing the
interconnectedness of theology and elite and folk reli-
gion as the source of legendry. Bennett is correct that
Blehr's belief stories are legends as much as her "be-
lief-related genres and other oddities" are also legends.
Blehr's well focused rhetorical questions and treatment
of ambiguously used terms revolve around the ideas
of von Sydow, his disciples and successors. In regard
to Wayland Hand's preoccupation with "belief tradi-
tions," Bennett has correctly inferred that "he clearly
thought that they were legends" (Bennett 1989, 290).
As already stated, Hand used the word superstition,
that is, superstitious belief in the sense of:
A challenge to the accepted view of things, whether
from a civil or judical perspective, or a dissent from
religious precepts and prevailingmoral customs. This
retreatfrom authorityis accomplishednot so much by
breakingaway from accepted norms of society and of
the church,as it is by merelyholding fast to older ideas
and modes of thought that have all been abandoned
(Hand 1981, l:xxx).
But his profound knowledge of beliefs necessarily led
to his discovery that "superstitions" (statements of be-
lief) are, "rarely, if ever discussed in a detached way;
they are lived and experienced," "Customs often rep-
resent the acting out of belief, and memorates and leg-
ends illustrate belief in actual examples" (Hand, 1968,
43
225). The recognition that belief can be expressed in
acts and in telling prompted Hand to appeal to his col-
leagues for the construction of anAmerican legend clas-
sification system long before a feasible collection of texts
was assembled. This was the situation when I met him
at the first International Society for Folk Narrative Re-
search (ISFNR) congress in Kiel. Hand's idea that be-
lief interconnects custom and narrative was appealing
to me, and we agreed to start collecting examples to
show the intricacies of text variables held together by
common belief and to present a joint paper on our find-
ings at the next congress. For years we worked on the
project and exchanged materials via airmail corre-
spondence between Los Angeles and Budapest. But we
ran into irreconcilable differences in our thinking. As a
philologist, Hand assembled and constructed units of
formally and thematically similar but generically unre-
lated beliefs, rituals and legends, taken from literary or
archival sources in diverse American regional subcul-
tures; while my examples were field observed, identi-
cal cases of belief performed both dramatically and
narrationally in the same community. I presented my
findings at the 1964 Athens congress (Degh 1965a), and
Hand put together and read our co-authored paper at
the 1969 Bucharest congress which I did not attend. He
was correct in looking for the legend in the web of tra-
ditions based on belief, but he depended on literary
sources, not on personal observation.
To argue here against the use of a category called
"belief legend" (Glaubenssage, Glaubensfabulate),"folk
belief story" or "belief tale" as a scholarly concept, I
have had to discuss a number of seemingly separate
issues including ideas of traditional and modern schol-
ars, the formal and the ideological constructs of the leg-
end as a genre and the attempts at characterisation, clas-
sification and naming, in the hope of suggesting a plat-
form of collaboration for breaking the present dead-
lock and opening a new path toward understanding
the legend. Operationally, the term "belief legend"
played an important role at the time legends became
the targets of ethnographic study, and it was helpful in
exploring the multitude of ways religious belief ma-
nipulates legend formation. But the lack of stability in
belief, as seen in communal and individual uncertainty,
causes the fluctuation of practice, and leads to
unpredictability of the narrative summary. This condi-
tion makes traditional approaches-classification and
so on-impossible. The more subcategories, the greater
chaos we create.
International folklorists who have learned their trade
and are used to the practical tools of the comparative
method will be able to analyse this mass of data by
identifying content units for general understanding, and
find out what they are best qualified to explore: what
legends mean to their bearers, and how they affect these
bearer's lives. As so many people have stated since W.E.
Peuckert's book Geburtund Antwort der mythischenWelt
(Peuckert 1965), legends seek answers about the nature
of the supernatural world and its effect on people. Our
44 Linda Degh

guiding light should be the inherent belief core and its might wonder how these boring stories will re-enter
alterations, because the position of belief varies, not only oral tradition after the "urban legend" fashion declines.
from person to person, but from telling to telling by the There is no danger of the demise of legendry when
same person under changing conditions. The legend the currently fashionable themes pass with the specific
experience is pessimistic, often tragic, even if it can be belief systems that infuse life into them: religious belief
turned into the absurd, the weird, brutal, cruel, uncanny and irrationality are still growing and aiming at new
and grotesque. The underlying philosophy is a painful peaks. There are more legends-past, present and emer-
admission of helplessness and impending defeat. How- gent-at hand than folklorists have ever dreamed
ever, by submitting to the inevitable-mortality-the about. My recent five months' visit in central-eastern
worldview of the legend can interpret tragic outcome Europe infused me with the pride of a clairvoyant: I
as hope and joyous expectation of immortality. All ghost had predicted a spectacular boom in supernaturalism
stories are anticipations of a Christian spiritual after- as soon as the Iron Curtain was lifted. In print, televi-
life: if ghosts can return, there is a happier existence sion, movies, videos and personal appearances, famous
beyond the grave; and we will also be able to return. preachers, gurus and occultists spread their doctrines
This personal and collective meaning of legends (or in response to public demand. UFO clubs, spiritualist
negation of it) is more or less inherent in all legend texts, churches, pagans, shamans and satanists emerge, while
revealed by the dynamics of the legend dialectics. fundamentalist religions attract masses of seekers, com-
Conversation about belief, the contemplation of hu- peting with the restored denominations of traditional
man destiny, is on the mind of everyone born into this religions. A new legendry is in the making and spread-
world. It is the common denominator of all legends. ing among peoples troubled by the consequences of
Therefore our field study of legend needs to address political and economic transformation. From Billy
and build on the local religious system and its every- Graham to Uri Geller, people receive encouragement
day practices. Folkloristic methodology has developed from the sophisticated western countries-the gap
specific approaches for such sensitive narrator-centred closes rapidly, as the former Soviet bloc assimilates the
depth research. Being a humanistic field, folkloristics level of folk religiosity of the free world. We have to
is more focused on personal creativity than are related prepare for a new chapter of legendary fashion as new
disciplines. We pay special attention to the life, person- culture areas are opened and informed by their belief
ality and expressivity of narrators as they project their system ripening new stories.
thoughts and visions and articulate their concerns. To summarise my reflections on the idea "belief leg-
Thus, our approach to the formulations of legend as a end." With many asides and detours,which I could not
genre, not irrespective of momentary, individual sty- avoid because of my fear of bypassing important re-
listic or content variables, will open new vistas to eth- lated issues, I have argued that I oppose the "rehabili-
nographic (contemporary) legend study. tation" of the "rediscovered" belief stories and their
In our time, legend study blossoms as we intensify sheltering under the umbrella term "legend" as Bennett
our speculation about legends within easy reach of us. suggests. I do not see her proposal as a first step to-
We demand more contextualisation, more authentic ward "serious attention" providing a "theoretical
recording and interpretive analysis. At the same time, framework" for this rehabilitation (Bennett 1989, 304)
a current legend boom is generated by the collabora- because I do not believe there is a need to retain the
tion of legend communicators and researchers. Urban distinction implied in such a category. Bennett herself
legend fashion is our own making: the marketing of acknowledges that all legends are "belief related gen-
texts for popular audiences has broadened the range res" (292). What then is the theoretical benefit of the
of consumers and producers, and turned amateurs into retention of a term that emphasises "belief" as a quali-
expert experiencers. Folklorists obtain more texts for fier of legend without the justification of its exclusion
their popular books, yet the bestselling collections do from other legend categories? The preservation of "be-
not represent the high level of authenticity we demand lief legend" does not eliminate but add to the confu-
in our essays, as if researchers had different standards sion surrounding attempts to define the genre. My ar-
for theory and for publication. As the number of col- gument is based on sufficiently documented evidence
lections increases and gains new ground in European that belief is not simply related in some unexplained,
countries, the quality of texts decrease, lacking context, unspecified way to legend but that belief itself is the
spontaneity and originality. The published items lack core, the raison d'etre of the legend as a genre. But be-
also the freshness of oral narration; they are either re- yond belief, all additional components of legend defi-
written, brief, abstracted versions of oral or written texts nitions provided by scholars fit the definition of the
but more often than not, clippings and summaries of "belief legend" as well. The term "legend" serves our
media sources. There is little variation in the not too purpose fine.
large, contingent of well known legend types. Small
paperback volumes also add a miscellany of anecdotes, FolkloreInstitute
gossip and personal accounts of suspect origin; one Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
What Is A Belief Legend?
Notes
'Particular mention should be made of ground breaking
works that called attention to folk legends in popular liter-
ary publications: Albert Wesselski's chapter "Die Formen der
volkstumlichen Erzahlguts" in Adolf Spamer's Deutsche
Volkskunde1:216-48; Walter Anderson's clipping of stories
from local newspapers and weeklies; Bausinger's collection
and definition of "everyday narration" ("alltagliches
Erzahlen" (Bausinger 1975, 323-30) and Rudolf Schenda's lat-
est attempt to trace the cultural history of folk narration in
Europe (1993).
2Gwyndaf's chart illustrates my description of the two
kinds of manifestation of belief (cf. Gwyndaf 1994, 230; Degh
1965a).
3Parental influence on schoolchildren's legend repertoire
and reporting style is well documented in Halloween leg-
ends a schoolteacher volunteered to collect from her pupils
upon my request (Degh 1986, 127-72).
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