What We Lose When Folklore Goes Global

Or: why Tinker Bell has a franchise and the Pharisees have a footnote

Tinker Bell was invented in 1904, in a play by J. M. Barrie, as a beam of light operated by a hand mirror. She has no wings in the original stage production — she cannot, because she is not embodied at all. By the time Disney finished with her, she was small, winged, blonde, and globally recognisable. She has her own spin-off film series. She is available as a costume in approximately forty-seven sizes.

The Sussex Pharisees — the actual fairy tradition of this county, documented by Charlotte Latham in 1868, arising from the peculiar plural reduplication of the local dialect — have no franchise. They travel as lights. They leave no footprints in snow. They have no wings. They are not available as a Halloween costume, schoolchildren don't know them, and explaining them at a party requires at least two sentences and occasionally a brief etymology.

This is not a coincidence. It is a consequence.

 

What the global market needs from folklore

A story that travels needs to be legible without context. Tinker Bell, Cinderella, the Little Mermaid — these are figures stripped of their specific cultural anxieties and replaced with universal sentiments. The Little Mermaid, in the hands of Hans Christian Andersen, is a story about the specific terror of longing to inhabit a world that was not made for you, and the cost of self-erasure in attempting it. In the hands of Disney, it is a story about following your dreams. Both are stories. Only one of them belongs to a specific place.

The Sussex knucker — the water beast of the Weald, associated with specific pools at Lyminster and elsewhere, fed by springs whose depth was held to be immeasurable — is not a generic sea monster. It is a creature of chalk geology and high water tables. Its myth encodes the specific character of the Sussex landscape: the sudden springs, the boggy valleys, the pools that appear and do not drain. You cannot move it to another county without changing what it means.

The Dobbs is a Sussex domestic spirit, sparsely attested and exactly as strange as the household it inhabits. It is not a brownie, not a boggart, not a hobgoblin. It is a Dobbs — a term from a specific place, attached to a specific set of beliefs, belonging to communities who knew exactly which houses had one and what it expected in return.

These creatures do not travel because they are too specific. That specificity is not a deficiency. It is the whole point.

What specificity does

When a tradition is rooted in a particular landscape, a particular community, a particular set of historical conditions, it encodes those things.

The Pharisees, with their dialect name and their physics-defying uncanniness, tell you something about how Sussex people understood the uncanny that no generic fairy can.

Making Jack in the Green: a living tradition

The knucker tells you something about how people lived alongside the wetlands and springs of the Weald.

The Jack in the Green — Georgian, specific, contested, a living tradition — tells you something about the labour economy of early industrial London and the community that chose to mark May Day by carrying a man dressed in leaves through the streets.

Global folklore tells you something universal, which is to say something about no particular place at all.

What we become when culture is a product

There is a more uncomfortable version of this argument, and it runs as follows: when folklore is owned and sold, the relationship between a community and its culture changes. You are no longer a participant in something that grows and changes with you.

You are a customer.

Making a Sussex Trug: a living tradition

The product is fixed, the costume is available online, the story ends the same way every time because a corporation has a financial interest in it ending the same way.

Folk traditions — the messy, contested, community-built kind — do not end the same way every time, because there is no rights-holder to enforce consistency. The Hastings Jack in the Green revival is forty-two years old and has its own internal arguments about how the festival should be run, which elements are essential, and what new things can be added.

Those arguments are not a problem. They are the tradition working. They are the community participating in something it owns, collectively, in the way that communities have always owned the things they make together.

Nobody argues about Tinker Bell. Her story is the intellectual property of the Disney corporation.

A small, cheerful act of resistance

Untruth Seekers is not trying to compete with Disney. We are aware of the relative sizes of the respective operations.

We are also criticising anyone who loves Disney and other international corporate touchstones. (We love them too! We know all the words to Under the Sea)

What we are trying to do is keep alive the pleasure of curiosity about specific places, specific creatures, specific moments in history that belong to a particular stretch of downland or coastline or forest. The Pharisees are stranger than Tinker Bell. The knucker is more interesting than a generic sea monster. The Dobbs is more useful — conceptually, imaginatively — than a brownie imported from another county.

None of this is available as a plastic costume. That is, in a small way, the point. Creativity, curiosity, and community are not products. They are practices. And practices require participants, not customers.

The folklore of Sussex is not running out of things to offer. Neither, we think, are the people who are curious about it.

Modern retellings of Sussex folklore

Sussex Roots

Sussex Roots began as an experiment by people who were not sure anyone would come with them. We were pleasantly surprised when people did.

From fearsome giants and cackling witches to ancient beasts and the drumbeat of a modern May Day procession, Sussex Roots traces the unexpected stories that shaped this corner of England – including, right at the heart of it, Jack in the Green.

Sussex Roots, second edition, is available here (UK) and here (US).

The Untruth Seekers are dedicated investigators of the legends, ghost stories, and historical mysteries lurking beneath the surface of Sussex and beyond. Their confidential files document the folklore, hauntings, and half-buried histories that most people walk past without a second glance. All findings are published under the series From the Confidential Files of the Untruth Seekers, for readers who suspect there is always more to the story.