Fakelore

Fakelore is inauthentic, manufactured folklore presented as if it were genuinely traditional. The term can refer to new stories or songs made up out of whole cloth, or to folklore that is reworked and modified for modern tastes. The element of misrepresentation is central; artists who draw on traditional stories in their work are not producing fakelore unless they claim that their creations are real folklore.

The term fakelore was coined in 1950 by American folklorist Richard M. Dorson. Dorson's examples included the fictional cowboy Pecos Bill, who was presented as a folk hero of the American West but was actually invented by the writer Edward J. O'Reilly in 1923. Dorson also regarded Paul Bunyan as fakelore. Although Bunyan originated as a character in traditional tales told by loggers in the Great Lakes region of North America, an ad writer working for the Red River Lumber Company invented many of the stories about him that are known today. According to Dorson, advertisers and popularizers turned Bunyan into a "pseudo folk hero of twentieth-century mass culture" who bears little resemblance to the original.

Folklorismus, often Anglicized to folklorism, also refers to the invention or adaptation of folklore. Unlike fakelore, however, folklorism is not necessarily misleading; it includes any use of a tradition outside the cultural context in which it was created. The term was first used in the early 1960s by German scholars, who were primarily interested in the use of folklore by the tourism industry. However, professional art based on folklore, TV commercials with fairy tale characters, and even academic studies of folklore are all forms of folklorism.

Controversy

The term fakelore is often used by those who seek to expose or debunk it, including Dorson himself, who spoke of a "battle against fakelore". Dorson complained that popularizers had sentimentalized folklore, stereotyping the people who created it as quaint and whimsical -- whereas the real thing was often "repetitive, clumsy, meaningless and obscene". He contrasted the genuine Paul Bunyan tales, which had been so full of technical logging terms that outsiders would find parts of them difficult to understand, with the commercialized versions, which sounded more like children's books. The original Paul Bunyan had been shrewd and sometimes ignoble; one story told how he cheated his men out of their pay. Mass culture provided a sanitized Bunyan with a "spirit of gargantuan whimsy [that] reflects no actual mood of lumberjacks". Daniel G. Hoffman said that Bunyan, a folk hero, had been turned into a mouthpiece for capitalists: "This is an example of the way in which a traditional symbol has been used to manipulate the minds of people who had nothing to do with its creation."

Others have argued that professionally created art and folklore are constantly influencing each other, and that this mutual influence should be studied rather than condemned. For example, Jon Olson, a professor of anthropology, reported that while growing up he heard Paul Bunyan stories that had originated as lumber company advertising. Dorson had seen the effect of print sources on orally transmitted Paul Bunyan stories as a form of cross-contamination that "hopelessly muddied the lore". For Olson, however, "the point is that I personally was exposed to Paul Bunyan in the genre of a living oral tradition, not of lumberjacks (of which there are precious few remaining), but of the present people of the area." What was fakelore had become folklore again.

Examples of fakelore

American folk heroes

In addition to Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, Dorson identified the American folk hero Joe Magarac as fakelore. Magarac, a fictional steelworker, first appeared in 1931 in a Scribner's Magazine story by the writer Owen Francis. He was a literal man of steel who made rails from molten metal with his bare hands; he refused an opportunity to marry in order to devote himself to working 24 hours a day, worked so hard that the mill had to shut down, and finally, in despair at enforced idleness, melted himself down in the mill's furnace in order to improve the quality of the steel. Francis said he heard this story from immigrant steelworkers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; he reported that they told him the word magarac was a compliment, then laughed and talked to each other in their own language, which he did not speak. The word actually means "jackass" in Croatian. Since no trace of the existence of Joe Magarac stories prior to 1931 has been discovered, Francis's informants may have made the character up as joke on him. Even if Joe Magarac stories did exist in some form, they probably did not closely resemble Francis's story, told in a contrived imitation of "Hunkie" dialect, of a heroic worker who sacrifices everything for the mill. Magarac, portrayed as a hero, was a better fit for the agenda of U.S. Steel, who used the character in corporate publications starting in the 1940s; in their version, he was called Magarac because he worked hard, like a mule. When the decline of the steel industry brought unemployment to steel towns, however, Magarac's despair at being out of work gained new relevance. In 1998, Gilley and Burnett reported "only tentative signs that the Magarac story has truly made a substantive transformation from 'fake-' into 'folklore'", but noted his importance as a local cultural icon.

Other American folk heroes that have been called fakelore include Old Stormalong, Febold Feboldson, Daddy Joe, Daddy Mention, Big Mose, Strap Buckner, Tony Beaver, Bowleg Bill, Whiskey Jack, Annie Christmas, and Antoine Barada. Marshall Fishwick describes these largely literary figures as imitations of Paul Bunyan.

Others

• There is little historical evidence of a goddess named 'Eostre' or 'Ostara', but the Venerable Bede spoke of the possibility of such a source, and Jakob Grimm claimed to have found evidence of her in German traditions. A story in which she transforms her pet bird into a rabbit that then lays eggs for children is of uncertain ancestry, but has no report older than 1990 (Sarah Ban Breathnach, 'Nostalgic Suggestions for Re-Creating the Family Celebrations and Seasonal Pastimes of the Victorian Home'). Some have suggested that this story and another where Eostre was described as having the head of a hare, even though there are no images of animal-headed deities in Anglo-Saxon art, were invented recently and circulated among neopagans as the 'real origin' of Easter.

• Although little is universal amongst Neopagan groups, some groups and individuals have propagated several instances of fakelore. In recent years, the familiar red and white colours of Santa Claus have been erroneously attributed to Coca-Cola, which popularised the image rather than creating it [1]. Neopagan fakelore attributes these colours either to 'blood on the snow' or to an alleged shamanic practice in which reindeer would be skinned and their hide worn inside out, thus creating a red garment with white fringes. A neopagan monologue broadcast on radio, The Mendip Shaman, popularised this belief. As the characteristic red and white Santa only evolved in the 1920s, attributing these colours to shamans skinning reindeer is clearly inaccurate. The true origin of Santa Claus' appearance and colors is in the depictions of St. Nicholas in Europe and America, as well as the traditional tomte combined with other elements of pre-Christain indigenous paganism in Sweden, such as allusions of depictions of Odin and the Wild Hunt. These surviving traditions were probably an influence on Haddon Sundblom, the Swedish-American artist who popularized the image of Santa Claus for Coca-Cola.

• A number of Wiccan, Neopagan and even some "Traditionalist" or "Tribalist" groups have a history of spurious "Grandmother Stories" - usually involving initiation by a Grandmother, Grandfather, or other elderly relative who is said to have instructed them in the secret, millennia-old traditions of their ancestors. As this "secret wisdom" has almost always been traced to recent sources, or been quite obviously concocted even more recently, most proponents of these stories have eventually admitted they made them up. These "origin myths" are sometimes also referred to as "The Myth of the Wicca." In these cases, rather than a case of folklorists from outside the community calling the Wiccan stories "fakelore", phrases such as "Grandmother Stories" and "The Myth of the Wicca" have become synonyms and shorthand for a specific type of fakelore found within the communities in question.

See also

• Astroturfing
• Christian mythology
• Folk etymology