Ah. "Fakelore"; good concept ~~ useful word to crush opposition down with. But has it perhaps had the counterproductive effect that any attempt at interpretation of any subtext is liable to be summarily dismissed as "Fakelore"? which is perhaps just as foolish an assumption as the one it was first postulated by good old Richard Dorson, & echoed by Dave Harker in Fakesong, to combat, of everything having some sort of Fraserian or whatever undertone? As the moral to one of Thurber's Fables For Our Time put it, "You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards".

If there is no symbolism at work in this case, what precisely, I ask you again to consider please, is the Foggy Dew, so near-universally [maybe 0·1% bugaboo to 99·99% Foggy Dew] adduced in all the versions that real people have heard of. I repeat ~~ dew is not foggy. If you are not backtracking, what was the point of your crack about kangaroo making more sense?

What, moreover, Steve, do you regard as "genuine use of symbolism"? Moby Dick? Macbeth's Weird Sisters? Tristram Shandy? Ghost Riders In The Sky? Frankenstein or The New Prometheus? Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde? Everyman? And what your qualifications to judge infallibly when its presence may be admitted?

~M~