Museum of British Folklore - discuss

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Cats
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:12 PM

Any idea where it might be housed or have I missed that bit?

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:13 PM

Always a bit helpful to read a thread, before posting Bubblyrat. IMHO..

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Rifleman (inactive)
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:17 PM

"Let us have a museum of ENGLISH folklore"
nothing like a bit of xenophobia to spice up the day, and yes bubblyrate PLEASE read the thread.
Thank You! Have a lovely day:-D

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 03:23 PM

"The Pitt Rivers is a fantastic museum and with lighting levels and labels that would never be allowed today. Few people who visit it are aware that you can ask for a torch at the front desk to help get a really good look at all those shrunken heads"

They have a witch in a bottle.

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:07 PM

They have a witch in a bottle.

That they do - as donated by the amazing Margaret Murray. Read all about it: http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/englishness-Margaret-Murray.html

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Ruth Archer
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 04:57 PM

They also have the trepanned skulls and sealskin arctic explorer's suits which partly inspired Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials. In fact, the whole museum did. It's right out of Lyra's world.

I love Pitt Rivers because it's almost a museum of itself. It's a homage to Victorian museums - but I understand it's going through a big refurb. I hope they don't ruin it.

Simon, if you turn up with kids they virtually MAKE you take a torch! They're like, "Open the drawers! Explore!" It's really magical there.

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: GUEST,Museum of British Folklore
Date: 02 Jun 09 - 06:21 PM

Folklore in England
On 10 March 1954, Murray gave her Presidential Address to the Folk-Lore Society about 'England as a field for folklore research'. This opens with an arresting statement:

It is surprising how few people are interested in England, that extraordinary country which lies south of the Tweed. Many men and women, trained at great expense, go abroad to look for folklore, and when they come back they write large volumes of peculiar rituals, of marriage customs, of curious beliefs, of folk tales and folk medicine, with tabulated lists of kinship systems, of agricultural systems, of trade systems, and so on. Yet here, under our very noses, is a country as full of strange unrecorded facts, beliefs and customs as any land overseas. England is in many ways the great Undiscovered Country. [Murray, 1954: 1]

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 08:17 AM

England is in many ways the great Undiscovered Country

I would think the same is true today as it was back then; where there is folk, there is folklore...

Meanwhile, just unpacking a few more boxes of books (we've only been here a year) and what should turn up but The Reader's Digest Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain (1973) which is a classic of its kind; 540 large format pages replete with lore, legend, custom and wonders all suitably illustrated - and not a Green Man in sight! Actually, the absence of the Green Man from this otherwise comprehensive volume is a fair indication of the general recentness of his arrival into the folkloric consciousness; indeed, if such a volume were written today, it would be he that adorns the cover, rather than the Dorset Ooser...

Needless to say it now takes pride of place on my bookshelves; however so waywardly popularist in its approach, no Museum of British Folklore should be without a copy!

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 08:39 AM

no Museum of British Folklore should be without a copy!

File under "British British Folklore Folklore". Then you could cross-reference the discussions on Mudcat about that kind of publication, filed under "British British Folklore Folklore Folklore"...

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 09:06 AM

The folklore of folklore, eh? Or even The Folklore of Fakelore, as once suggested, for even the recent re-inventions are more interesting as to what they represent on an unconscious level as oppose to the generally proscriptive approach taken by modern pagans and folkies alike - think of the teacher in The Wicker Man telling her girls that the Maypole is a Phallic Symbol. But there is something in the human mind that assumes that all things we can't understand directly must have a symbolic meaning, be it our various extant Folk Customs or such Folk Lore as Ring-a-Rosies, which is why, no doubt, such Mythconceptions abound. So even Mythconceptions are folklore, and ever more worthy of our attention...

S O'P (protected by the ejaculation of serpents).

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Gervase
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 11:49 AM

The folklore of folklore is likely to be a controversial topic - as seen by the defenders of the invented 'Jack in the Green' at Hastings, Gardnerian 'wiccanism' and the equally artificial Gorsedd stone traditions of Wales and tartan romanticism of Scotland.
The problem lies with drawing a line to separate invented traditions (in Hobsbawm's sense) and real folk traditions; to say what is bogus and what is not.
His own definition of invented traditions would seem to fit much of what we happily accept as folk custom today:
"'Invented tradition' is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past....
However, insofar as there is such reference to a historic past, the peculiarity of 'invented' traditions is that the continuity with it is largely fictitious. In short, they are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition."
Sadly a Museum of British Folklore is likely to appeal most to those most in thrall to the bogus and invented; to the plastic pagans and the sort of Sealed Knot types who dress in upholstery brocade. It's a bubble that will need to be pricked if the venture is to have credibility, however.

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 21 Jun 09 - 05:55 AM

the erstwhile Hancock Museum in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (presently being reinvented as The Great North Museum, swallowing many fine smaller museums in the process) which contained the unwrapped 2,500-year-old mummy of Irt-Irw, who is said to set off intruder alarms and has inspired various ghost hunts.

Visited the Great North Museum yesterday - a rainy Saturday afternoon in Canny Newcastle. This is the £26 million makeover that replaces both the old Hancock Museum and the Museum of Antiquities, supposedly bringing it all together one roof but only managing to dumb it all down to such an extent one is left with nothing but an overwhelming sense of irretrievable loss - gone is the coffee machine at the foot of the stairs where one might watch lowering piranhas in vast dark aquaria whilst slurping a scalding beverage or two.

Never quite the Pitt Rivers or the Natural History Museum, the Hancock was nevertheless a place of inspirational clutter, with seemingly endless galleries of pinned months, butterflies, beetles, tribal masks, Egyptian coffins, human skeletons, and more threadbare Victorian taxidermy than you shake a stick at - one chimpanzee was particularly disturbing, looking like something Dr. Frankenstein had stitched together on his lunch-break. Thing is, some of this Threadbare Taxidermy remains, selected specimens of Spheniscidae looking particularly forlorn in the context of these vast wide open spaces favouring interactive displays rather than actual exhibits.

It was good to see the Roman collections again, particularly the venerable head of Antenociticus (now at knee level - how the mighty are fallen!) and the Mithraic sculpture from the Roman Wall. One of the features of the ertswhile Museum of Antiquities was a lifesize reconstruction of the Temple of Mithras which one might view for the payment of 20p, to be greeted by lurid lighting, chilling sound effects and a rather solemn voice-over latterly delivered in the character of a Roman Centurion. All that remains is a film of same, grainy digital images projected onto a vast screen complete with subtitles and a larger than life size person signing. No problem with signing of course, but his modern dress does detract rather from the whole re-enactment vibe; certainly not the place one might lose touch with the outside world that it used to be.

As for my beloved Irt-Irw, she now lies in her caskets with bandages draped almost teasingly about her withered breasts and pubis no doubt out of a sense of post-modern modesty or else according the poor girla long belated dignity. Last night safe in bed at home in Lancashire after the 140-mile drive home, I imagined her coming alive in the dark, wandering the stripped-out galleries of this once splendid museum sobbing as she searched in vain for her thread-bare chimpanzee...

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: GUEST,jock
Date: 21 Jun 09 - 04:07 PM

The Great North Museum i.e. The Great North of England Museum ... so much for British.

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: GUEST,Mike of Hessle
Date: 26 Aug 09 - 08:06 AM

What about housing it in the Millenium Dome and incorparating the artefacts from Cecil Sharp House in it plus contributions from other parties

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: GUEST,Jim Martin
Date: 27 Aug 09 - 07:34 AM

"What about housing it in the Millenium Dome and incorporating the artefacts from Cecil Sharp House in it plus contributions from other parties" - it's one use for that white elephant I suppose but would they be safe there, bearing in mind the attempted theft of the replica crown jewels?

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: GUEST,Jim Martin
Date: 06 Oct 09 - 10:10 AM

refresh

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 12:40 PM

5 years later...

Here's a really good promotional video for the project: Museum of British Folklore, and a related article with pictures: Film: Tom Chick's amazing film to promote the Museum of British Folklore!.

It popped up on my Facebook feed via the Song Collectors Collective, who note that "Simon Costin will be talking at the Song Collectors Conference about his Museum of British Folklore". Here's a link for the 2013 Song Collectors Collective Conference.

~ Becky in Long Beach, Calif.

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 12:44 PM

Not sure why there's not a link at the SCC site, but here's a link from the Nest Collective for the 2014 Song Collectors Collective Conference, where Simon Costin of the Museum of British Folklore will speak.

~ B in LB

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 12:51 PM

And, of course the Museum has a website now, with blog and whatnot, www.museumofbritishfolklore.com/, and a Facebook page, www.facebook.com/themuseumofbritishfolklore.

~ B in LB

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 01:01 PM

And for those who want the basics before reading the thread and clicking links: the museum does not have a physical home yet, but Simon and others are making the push to make it happen. In the meantime, exhibits have been shown at other venues.

~ B in LB

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 02:09 PM

One more link... 21st Century Folk Culture is the Museum's new online project - more of a longform blog. (I mispoke earlier: the Museum's own site has "News" and "Events and Exhibits", but not a blog, per se.)

I'll quit now, I promise!

~ Becky in Long Beach

Subject: RE: Museum of British Folklore - discuss
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 23 Apr 14 - 03:14 PM

Refresh for St. George's Day...