Folklore
Riddles: the oldest game with words
Riddling appears across an extraordinary range of societies, frequently in formal settings, and it does considerably more than entertain children.
Folklore
Stories that survived because someone kept telling them.
Folklore
Lullabies are frequently not comforting
Songs sung to get children to sleep share musical features across the world and, in their words, cover subjects a great deal darker than the tune suggests.
Folklore
Weather lore: what the sayings actually predict
Traditional weather sayings range from reliable short-range indicators to complete nonsense, and the distinction is fairly easy to draw.
Folklore
Place names are the oldest documents in the landscape
Names attached to hills, rivers and fields frequently outlast the languages that produced them, and they preserve information about vegetation, ownership and events that no record survives for.
Folklore
The wise fool: the character who is right for the wrong reasons
A figure who appears foolish and turns out to have made a point runs through folk traditions across a very wide area, and the stories are frequently sharper than they look.
Folklore
Proverbs: an argument compressed into eight words
Every language has them, they frequently contradict each other, and that contradiction is a feature of how they are used rather than a flaw.
Folklore
People who become animals: transformation stories and what they carry
Seal-wives, bear-husbands, fox-spirits and shape-changers appear across unconnected traditions, and the stories are usually about the boundary between the household and everything outside it.
Folklore
The otherworld had an address, and it was usually the field you did not plough
Beliefs about places belonging to something other than people had a consistent effect: certain ground was left alone, sometimes for centuries.
Folklore
Haunted geography: why ghost stories attach to specific places
The distribution of ghost stories across a landscape is not random. They cluster on boundaries, crossings, and places where something happened that a community needed to keep talking about.
Folklore
Changeling stories and what they were really about
Tales of a child swapped for something else appear across northern Europe and beyond. Reading them as explanations rather than as fantasy makes them considerably darker and more useful.
Folklore
The trickster: the figure who turns up everywhere and breaks the rules
Spider, coyote, hare, raven, fox, a wandering fool. Traditions with no contact produced characters who share a job, and the job tells you something about what stories are for.
Folklore
The flood story is everywhere, and the reasons are not what you think
Deluge narratives appear on every inhabited continent. Explaining that requires being careful about what counts as the same story.