7 www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20/legends.pdf
WHERE THEY ORIGINATED…
SOME CONTEMPORARY LEGENDS AND
THEIR LITERARY ORIGINS
Rolf W. Brednich
I started collecting contemporary legends in Germany in the early
1980s and published my first collection in 1990 which was followed
by three other volumes in 1991–1996 with a total of ca. 500 text
types published. Hence though I did not have the ambition to compete
with “Mister urban legend”, Professor Jan H. Brunvand of the
USA and his famous editions “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” or “The
Mexican Pet”, my collections have been very well accepted by the
German speaking reading public. More than one million copies have
been sold to date, and three of my four paperbacks have been translated
into a number of European languages and into Japanese. This
indicates that contemporary legends are easily transferable from
one language and culture to the other. On their way across the
borders they need only some additional local or regional motifs or
narrative details to be attractive again.
Speaking in general terms, contemporary legends are no longer
the characteristics of the narrative culture of a nation, but they
belong to a new strata of oral tradition with a world wide distribution.
This is due to the increased mobility of our modern society, to
tourism, and of course to unlimited international communication
and networks. Through these channels the stories about strange
and curious events and mishaps are easily transmitted from continent
to continent and become again a part of oral circulation and
dissemination. Contemporary legends can be regarded as an indication
of a world-wide society living in a global village which, at least
partly, shares the same wishes, longings, values and anxieties. Although
their actual circulation and distribution is heavily supported
by the modern mass media, contemporary legends basically belong
to oral tradition, and they prove by their existence that even in our
modern technical world hundreds and hundreds of stories are still
generated and transmitted from mouth to mouth.
8www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20
The scholarly investigation of the genre started with the first Sheffield
conferences in the early 80s and currently lies in the hands of
a group of specialists centred around the International Society for
Contemporary Legends Research (ISCLR). It publishes the Foaftale
Newsletter and the Yearbook “Contemporary Legend” and its members
meet every year in Sheffield or other places. Unfortunately,
the scholarly contributions to these conferences are no longer available
in print as were the former proceedings, edited by Paul Smith
and Gillian Bennett.
In the decade since the white heat of the initial projects faded, much
has changed. Although contemporary legends (or urban myths) are,
beside jokes and ethnic slurs, still the most lively and powerful
genre of modern folklore, we now have to relate to an increasingly
efficient system for recording and disseminating knowledge. As the
body of information increases, so does its periphery, and the grey
areas beyond its margins begin to take on a life on their own. This
effect was evident from the earliest days of the Internet: one of the
first discussion groups to emerge from the techno-programming
chat was a forum dedicated to urban legends (Alt.folklore.urban,
which still exists as the powerful AFU & Urban Legends Archive
on the Net). After the discovery of the new genre itself and its hundreds
of attractive topics, the interest soon shifted towards the question
of their truth. “Did that really happen or not?” “Does the Vanishing
Hitchhiker exist or not?”“Was there ever a killer in the back
seat arrested and where?” “Is there any evidence that sperm in a
bathtub can cause pregnancy?” “Do Antarctic penguins really fall
over onto their backs whenever jets happen to fly over their colonies
on the beaches of the Falkland Islands?” Or even less likely:“Is
it true that a penny dropped from the Empire State Building would
make a deep dent in the pavement or even could kill a person?”
The attempt to classify these and thousands of other questions produced
a bewildering number of ontological categories: “Tb” for “believed
true but not proven”, “Ft” for “mostly untrue but with a true
occurrence or known origin”, “U” for “unanswered and/or unanswerable”,
“P” for “may not have happened but theoretically possible”,
etc. Even the titles of the urban legends newsgroups reveal
that what was once the domain of professional folklore collectors
has now turned into a mass entertainment situated between game
Rolf W. Brednich
9 www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20
and gossip: www.snopes, www.redrival, www.scambusters,
www.netsquirrel, www.toybox. The snope-newsgroup for example
is the voice of a “San Fernando Valley Folklore Society” – in other
words some folklorists themselves have started to produce the
material which a future generation may be eager to collect. Other
newsgroups such as www.hoaxkill.com have started warning their
users against trusting rumours or believing in mere hearsays.
www.netsquirrel provides you with the ultimate “Urban Legend
Combat Kit” and caution against forwarding email hoaxes to your
friends that promise that “something great will happen” if you send
an email to all yours friends (M&M is going to give you a free case
of M&Ms if you do that).
The impetus from global communications has given contemporary
legends a high degree of potency in the real world. The most unlikely
yarns have been picked up by press agencies and TV stations.
Ulrich Wickert, a well known German TV news speaker used to
end his late night news show for a long time with an abbreviated
version of an urban legend taken from the Internet. So the Net
itself has become the prime breeding-ground for new generation of
urban, sometimes even dangerous, legends. Reuters and Proctor &
Gamble have been forced to change their corporate logos as a result
of persistent rumours about their Satanic symbolism. Marlborough
had to do the same with its cigarette boxes because of
suspicion of affiliation with the Ku-Klux-Klan, and the German producer
of the famous Birkenstock sandals had to defend himself publicly
through newspaper advertisements against reproaches that
his money supported neo-Nazis.
Furthermore, the publication of seemingly endless collections of
texts for the use of the common reader has shifted from the hands
of folklorists to those of journalists and collectors/editors with no
interest in scholarly research, only in providing material for dinner-party
anecdotes. They want to entertain, frighten or amuse
their readers with the most ugly, nasty and sensational narratives.
Films like “Urban Legends” or the “Blair Witch Project” have contributed
to public acknowledgement of modern legends as a separate
genre and as a an integral part of contemporary society.
Given such a situation, I strongly urge a re-engagement of folk
narrative researchers with this field. I regard it as our duty to reguContemporary
Legends and Literary Origins
10www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20
larly inform the public about the results of scholarly research, which
should not be concealed in our journals, newsletters and yearbooks.
We should not leave the entire field, which we once initiated, in the
hands of what Richard Dorson once called fakelorists.
My present paper aims to examine the origins of some of these
international narratives and the meanings they transmit. The most
important source of contemporary legends is life itself, i.e. a considerably
high percentage of the texts go back to real events: a
“grain of truth” (German: ein Körnchen Wahrheit) is preserved in
these stories. The truth is often concealed behind the imagination
of the storytellers who, by changing details or adding new motifs,
make the stories a part of their own world view. Those elements of
the texts which seem to be invented or constructed, however, should
not be called “untrue” or false. They are still realistic and could
have happened as reported. And you never know if they will happen
in the future in the same or similar way as they have been re-
ported.
Our responsibility as researchers is not so much to prove the truth
and to answer the question as to whether they ever happened, but
to inquire into the basic meanings of contemporary legends. If we
start asking about the cultural significance and values transmitted
by them, this will open up, at least in theory, a world without limits.
The reluctance of scholars of urban legends to delve into this
field is understandable, because it would no longer provide topic for
dinner-parties. But it would lead to deep insights into our attitudes,
prejudices and suppressed wishes. In this respect, not much has
been done to date. To give just one good example: Bent af Klintberg
was the one to ask the question “Why are there so many legends of
revenge?” And his answer was that deep inside us there is a suppressed
wish to take justice in our own hand and to do what the law
prohibits us from doing. Instead of doing so we narrate urban legends
about revenge: Sounds plausible, but it does not make you
popular. The same would be the case if you would do in-depth studies
about the widespread xenophobia which persists in these legends,
which tell you that foreigners want to steal your kidneys,
your cars or even your children, and that it is even more dangerous
to travel into the homelands of these strange and frightening be-
ings.
Rolf W. Brednich
11 www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20
Of no less importance is the often intriguing search for the sources
of contemporary legends. In particular the role of literature in the
process of transmitting narratives and the changing meaning of the
plots deserves further investigation and scholarship. This gives me
the opportunity to come to the focus of my paper. A certain portion
of modern legends are literary inventions which can be traced back
to known authors. The British writer Roald Dahl e.g. had the talent
to create many a short story which in their structure resemble
contemporary legends. Some of them like “Chippendale”, “Lambleg”
or “The Red Wine Conoisseur” entered into oral circulation. The
search for literary elements in modern folklore is a relatively new
approach in folkloristics. Most past studies worked the other way
round. It was very common to look for folklore elements in the
work of prominent authors. “Folk in Lit” studies have been very
popular in the US. Looking for literary sources in modern oral folklore
is not less challenging, and promises some unexpected results
concerning the relationship between orality and scriptuality, a debate
which is always going on in our discipline. Let me give you a
first example.
In my third collection of contemporary legends I have published the
following text (slightly shortened):
The brother-in-law of a fellow student of my informant has told
him, that on a flight from Madrid (Spain) to Munich (Germany)
he met a German couple who experienced an almost unbelievable
adventure during their holidays in Spain. They visited a church
in Madrid and did not pay attention to the time. They got locked
in and had to spent the night in the church. After the bell had
rung midnight, the organ suddenly started playing and from a
side portal a procession of disguised monks holding burning candles
moved to the altar,escorting a girl with a shaven head dressed
in a shirt. At the altar, the monks removed a big tile from the
floor, to give access to a dark dungeon. After a hymn was sung
and a prayer murmured, the girl was pushed into the abyss and
the tile set back in its old place. With the play of the organ, the
strange monks’ procession headed for the hidden door and disappeared.
This was all observed by the German couple from the
shadows in the background and they were stiff with terror. As
soon as they could get out of the church next morning, they imContemporary
Legends and Literary Origins
12www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20
mediately went to the German consulate to record their experience.
They were strongly recommended to keep their secret to
themselves, and to leave the country as soon as possible. So they
did, and not before the aircraft entered into German territory
did they dare to speak about their adventure to their neighbouring
passenger.
The story has everything that makes a good contemporary legend:
It is topical (it is reported to have happened in 1990), it is exciting,
plausible and credible, and it meets some common prejudices about
conservative Spain and the enigmatic role of mysterious secret societies
which act as the executive of the supposedly continuing inquisition.
There is as female victim, probably an adulteress (her
crime is not specified), there is a male court, there is the horrifying
penalty of being buryed alive, which sounds medieval, there are
witnesses: all this sounds logical, so it could be true... But is it
true? Has my informant reported about a real event?
I don’t think so: the story is too neatly plotted to be believed. My
suspicion arose with the first variant, which I heard from a Polish
colleague who told a slightly different story about a similar couple
who left their hiding place after the mysterious procession had disappeared
and looked behind the altar, where they found an open
trunk with a skeleton inside. This is again oral folklore, but now we
will go a step further, into booklore or literature. The German writer
and dramatist Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer (1878–1962) heard a quite
similar story from a friend of a friend (a photographer and architect),
and included it – enriched by some dramatic effects – into one
of his works that was intended to be evidence of the power of Catholicism
under the fascist Franco regime in Spain in the 1930s.
But to discover the real literary background of the story we must
go back to the early 19th century. The preference of romantic literature
for the sphere of the night, for monasteries and convents,
for nocturnal processions and funerals, is well known, and will not
be dealt with here in detail. It is sufficient to trace back the specific
motif of the girl buried alive in Romantic literature. We find it in
one of the outstanding pieces of “night literature” of this time, in
the Night Watches of Bonaventura which appeared in a series of
“New German Original Novels” in 1804. The anonymous work was
Rolf W. Brednich
13 www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20
for a long time attributed to the philosopher Friedrich Schelling,
but later on other names like Friedrich Gottlob Wetzel († 1819) or
Ernst August Klingemann have been brought into discussion of the
probable authorship. For our purposes, it is more important to know
that this novel, more or less a collection of short stories – composed
and to a remarkable extent depending on fragments of stories
already in circulation – became very popular in the 19th century,
and that its 10th chapter contains the story we are interested
in: It is entitled Dream of Love and – with obvious allusions to G. A.
Bürger’s Lenore – tells the story of the author’s nocturnal visit to a
convent of St. Ursula. The watchman invites him to be witness of a
strange incident: “They’re playing Let’s Bury–It in the convent, –
the old man continued –, do you want to watch? A chaste Ursuline
became a mother today; – in legend it would, of course, be recorded
as a miracle; however, they have peeked so often at God’s cards
that nowadays they no longer believe in any miracle. The saintly
virgin will be buried alive this night. I’ll let you in; take a look to
pass the time!” [The romantic irony or even the sarcasm of the text
cannot be overheard. Therefore, the witness is not very much horrified
by what he sees from behind a pillar]: The nun is entombed
into a dark vault with a jug of water, a loaf of bread, a crucifix, and
a prayer book. The scenery including the nocturnal procession, the
playing of the organ, the singing, etc. is very much the same as in
our oral legend of 1990. At the end of the episode the child of the
nun buried alive is entrusted to the nightly visitor who renders it to
the desperate father of the child.
For Bonaventura, the burial alive of a sinful nun is a metaphor.
Together with the other bizarre episodes of his novel, it stands for
the author’s radical anti-humanistic philosophy that the world is
perverse and tragic and that people act in it as helpless puppets.
Even convents, although they might be seen from the outside world
as safeguards of cultural values, prove to be medieval and deeply
inhuman. Contrary to the oral version, the literary document provides
the motivation for the cruel punishment of the woman. Apart
from this detail, we can conclude that there seems to be a continuity
between the romantic tale of 1804 and the contemporary legend.
Generally speaking, in fact, contemporary legends preserve
bits and pieces of literary sources, especially the most memorable
and tragic ones, which it is possible that could be true. In the work
Contemporary Legends and Literary Origins
14www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20
of Kolbenheyer, the episode of the nun buried alive is still a literary
metaphor, elucidating the power of Catholicism and inquisition in
modern Spain. In the modern legends, the metaphor is eventually
reduced to the mere fact that travelling in foreign countries might
be dangerous or frightening. Nevertheless, the old concept of Hans
Naumann’s theory of “Gesunkenes Kulturgut” (sunken cultural
values) could be still applied to the oral narrative. But in doing so,
we no longer believe in the ideology that the “folk” telling such a
story today is a full hundred years behind the achievements of socalled
high or sophisticated culture. The process of interrelationship
between written and oral literature can occur at any time and
any place: it is not a matter of high and low literature or culture, it
is just a question of communication and reception. Moreover, it is
reversible, because at the same time orally circulating narratives
can be transformed, as well, into literary short stories, novels, film
episodes, TV series, radio programmes etc. Everything goes...
Let me give you another example of the same process. This time I
will start with the literary source of a contemporary legend. In the
late 1930s, the German authoress Sophie Droste–Hülshoff, a descendant
of the renownedWestphalian Hülshoff family, wrote a short
story entitled “The Revenge of the boys of Winkelhofen” (a funny
story from Upper Bavaria). Content: Twice a year in Winkelhofen
there is a country fair.To both of them a man (“Schausteller”) would
appear with a shooting gallery and a chair-o-plane [Kettenkarussell].
The Winkelhofen boys would be responsible for the functioning of
the latter and as a reward they would get a free ride every sixth
round. One year the man came up with an old engine which replaced
the manpower of the boys. They took revenge by removing
the brake-handle (“Abstellhebel”) from the motor to the effect that
the fair inspection committee, which was offered the first ride free,
gets trapped in the chair-o-plane and has to ride between earth and
sky for a long time until the forester of the village gets the idea of
shooting the motor to pieces, which he finally does on his fourth
shot.
Again there is the quest for Meaning, rather than for the truth.
This little story can be regarded as a narrative metaphor for the
arrival of modern technology in the Bavarian countryside, the boys
being the representatives of the traditional way of life. When we
Rolf W. Brednich
15 www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20
turn to the world of contemporary narratives inspired by the literary
model, the meaning of the story is quite different. I have collected
several variants which can be summarised as follows:
After a birthday party, three friends decide to go to a country fair
in a small village near Kassel in Hessen. But it is already midnight,
and everything is turned off. They succeed in waking up
the owner of the chair-o-plane. Being very friendly and talked
into it by a bottle of wine, he turns his engine on and joins the
three young men riding his chair-o-plane. But: there is nobody to
stop the engine, all shouting is in vain, and they have to stay on
for the whole night until they are released the next morning. The
effect on the three students is disastrous: one is dead, the second
became insane during the night, and the third one jumps off,
survives, and decides to totally change his life.
If this can be called a (narrative) metaphor it stands for the dangers
of modern technology, which has to be handled and supervised very
carefully, or else it produces terrible effects on human life.
Almost the same moral is the focus of another contemporary legend
of world wide distribution, based in Australia. It is entitled “The
Run-Over”, and one of my German versions tells the following:
A group of four South German tourists is travelling by rented
car in the Australian bush when they suddenly run over a kangaroo.
Being good Germans, they call in at the next farm and ask
how to handle the damage they have done. The farmer laughs at
the question and proposes that they take a picture of the animal.
They head back to the fatal spot and put of the kangaroo in front
of the car. One of the tourists takes his jacket and drapes it around
the animal’s shoulders. Before the photographs could be taken,
the kangaroo came to life again and escapes into the bush, carrying
with the jacket the passenger’s passport, air ticket, driver’s
licence and credit cards.
The literary source of the story seems to be more than sixty years
old. According to Amanda Bishop, its first evidence was in the work
of the Australian author Ron Edwards “Yarns and Ballads of the
Australian Bush”. He tells the tall tale of a kangaroo that escaped
with a sum of 200 Dollars [presumably 100 pounds in the old days]
Contemporary Legends and Literary Origins
16www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20
in a pocket of a jacket and needed 15 years to spend the money on
beer in a local pub. From the kangaroo country of Australia, the
story has migrated to several National Parks in North America
where the animal to disappear with the personal belongings (or
even a baby) of a group of tourists is said to be a bear. In this case,
I am not sure about Ron Edwards being the inventor of the story.
He could just as well have heard it from an oral source and used it
for his bush yarn. If so, it would give us an example of the long lived
and never ending interrelationship between oral tradition and written
literature. And again, the meaning of the story is different in
literature and in folklore:Told as an Australian bush yarn, it is just
a funny tall tale, and nobody would really believe it; told as a contemporary
legend it can be regarded as a true story. After I published
the story in my second collection of “legendary tales of today”,
I got a letter from a German business man who claimed that
exactly the same thing happened to him in 1982 and he could even
prove it by enclosing the telegram in which he asked his German
boss to send him money and a provisional identification because an
Australian kangaroo run off with all his articles of value.
In conclusion, if my proposal for considering the quest for origin
and meaning in contemporary legend research (instead of for truth
or untruth) were to be taken up, it would give us much to do in the
future. It is a considerable challenge to investigate phenomena of
our increasingly media-dominated world. It seems that however –
despite its technological trappings – an essentially oral culture will
always survive. Contemporary legends may have literary origins or
be a creation of our own times, but there will always be the homo
narrans.
Paper presented at ISFNR Congress, in Melbourne, 2001
Rolf W. Brednich