Archer Taylor

" In the study of folklore it is desirable to separate popular or folk materials and literary, learned, or artistic materials. Literary or learned men have often imitated or adapted the various kinds of folklore. Their imitations are rarely intended to deceive and can usually be recognized without difficulty. . . . "Like the ballad and the tale, the riddle has popular and literary forms. A popular or folk riddle draws attention to the similarity between two wholly unrelated objects by a very simple rhetorical device. . . . "The literary riddle ordinarily contains a long series of assertions and contradictions and is often put in the form of speech made by the object that is being described. In order to accumulate details enough to permit the listener to guess the answer, the riddler often sacrificed the unity of his conception. The first assumption assertion and its denial are almost certain to conflict with the next pair. Yet the author goes on and on, while his conception becomes more and more incoherent." Archer Taylor

" 'Edward' and 'Sven I Roseng rd' is a comparative study of the English and Scandinavian ballad texts. The texts of numerous ballad versions are reproduced in the last half of the book." The aim of this comparison and analysis is not to determine as many 'original' traits as possible, but to establish the ballad's history and, above all, the manner of its dissemination. It is indeed a desperate undertaking to reconstruct a ballad text, and one hesitates to venture upon such a difficult task. But a systematic comparison and analysis of the variations tells us many things which can be discovered in no other way and leads us to a clearer understanding of the historical development. . . ." The most superficial examination of the versions of the ballad reveals the existence of two groups, the Scandinavian and the English. The differences which mark these groups are not merely linguistic, but concern also the ballad's structure and spirit." Archer Taylor

"O Du Armer Judas""The date of the origin of this song is very uncertain. There seems to be no record of the melody much before 1400; and the earliest documentary evidence of its satirical employment is nearly a hundred years later." Judas Iscariot in Charms and Incantations"The name of Judas in charms is, I believe, always employed in connexion with some event in the life of Christ. . . . _ e most popular allusion is, as might perhaps have been expected, to the betrayal of the Savior or to the false kiss of the traitor." The Judas Curse"This oath has, however, a very much wider distribution than is there indicated. It consists, in its briefest form, of the wish that the wrong-doer should share the lot of Judas ('habeat portionem cum Iuda'); but, according to the mood of the user, this form may be much expanded by allusion to the great sinners of the Bible from Cain to Ananias and Sapphira." The Gallows of Judas Iscariot"St. Matthew, with a reminiscence perhaps of Ahitophel's death, says that Judas committed suicide by hanging himself. But in failing to record what sort of tree the traitor chose he left a lacuna for later tradition to fill. This uncertainty might, indeed, be settled if there were any agreement among those travellers who have in later times been fortunate enough to see the tree itself." The Burning of Judas"In many countries the fi res which are lit at the coming of Spring are associated with Easter and with Judas. Sir J. G. Frazer and others have made it clear that these fi res are not of Christian origin, but are the remnants of pagan rites, now veiled under a Christian covering. Their original significance is still a disputed question." Archer Taylor

Reprint of Archer Taylor's Study in the History of a Folk-Tale originally published in 1927. "Such a tale as the "Black Ox," and probably every tale in circulation among the folk, is at the same time a definite entity and an abstraction. It is an entity in the particular form in which it happens to be recorded at any moment; it is an abstraction in the sense that no two versions ever exactly agree and that consequently the tale lives only in endless mutations. The life-history of the "Black Ox" may with some justice be said to be a contradiction in terms, for we have not stopped to define of which version of the "Black Ox" we shall write the history. The establishment of the normal form is consequently the process of defining just what we mean by the "tale of the Black Ox." Archer Taylor

In Northern Parallels to the Death of Pan, Archer Taylor identifies over two hundred variants of Plutarch's tale of the death of Pan. "I shall endeavor to illustrate the more clearly marked groups into which they subdivide themselves and to point out the special characteristics of each group. By this method it will be possible to show that the story has undergone many local modifications and that it enters, in one region or another, into a surprising variety of combinations with other, unrelated themes. . . . I begin with the tales which have the simplest form and pass on to the more involved combinations. Two distinct types of the story and one tale, which has some obscure connection with it, are treated in this fashion. The first type is represented by those stories in which the actors possess human form, and the second by those in which the actors are cats. Finally, a tale which deals with news of a fire is considered briefly." Archer Taylor

"This collection of riddles serves two purposes. It is, in the first place, a corpus of English traditional riddling ... . The widely scattered small collections of English popular riddles are here assembled and arranged systematically. An extensive view of the parallels and of related riddles provides a foundation for comparative studies." Archer Taylor

"The proverb and related forms have long been objects of general interest and the occasion of many books, but they have attracted little serious and thorough study . . . . The definition of a proverb is too difficult to repay the undertaking; and should we fortunately combine in a single definition all the essential elements and give each the proper emphasis, we should not even then have a touchstone. An incommunicable quality tells us this sentence is proverbial and that one is not. Hence no definition will enable us to identify positively a sentence as proverbial." Archer TaylorArcher Taylor's "The Proverb" (1931) and "An Index to 'The Proverb'"(1934) present the classic and comprehensive study on paremiology. The Proverb deals with definition problems, metaphorical proverbs, proverbial types, variants, proverbs in folk narratives and literature, loan translations and the classical or Biblical origin of many proverbs. Taylor analyzes customs and superstitions reflected in proverbs; he studies legal, medical and weather proverbs; and he also investigates their content and style. Proverbial prophecies, blasons populaires, proverbial expressions, wellerisms and proverbial comparisons are dealt with as well. The large index contains many comparative and bibliographical notes on major European proverbs.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.