The Future of Folklore is Feminist – Devedhek Lien an Werin yw Benelek
Historically, the domain of recording folklore has been dominated by men of varying degrees of emic and etic. The vast majority of the ‘sacred texts’ of folklore as an academic field are written by men, and the collections edited and published by women are frequently more and more niche as they are ignored. In some cases, those collections are stripped of gender so their author is an initial and surname.
The trend continues with folklore spilling onto the digital scene during the 2020s, with the most rapidly-growing accounts on sites like Instagram being run by men or run anonymously.
So why must the future of folklore be feminist?
Yn istorek, kovadha lien gwerin re beu gwarthevys gans gwer a radhow dyffrans a emyk hag etyk. Skrifys gans gwer yw rann vrassa a’n ‘tekstow sans’ a lien gwerin avel testen akademek yw skrifys gans gwer, hag yn fenowgh yth yw an kuntellow golegys ha dyllys gans benenes moy kudhys ha ni ow skonya aga aswon. Yn nebes kasys, genedh yw pilyes a’n kuntellow ma mayth yw aga awtour lytheren ha hanow teylu.
An tuedh a bes gans devera lien gwerin war an bys bysyel y’n 2020ow, gans an akontys hag usi ow tevi uskissa war leow kepar hag Instagram restrys gans gwer po restrys dihanow.
Ytho prag yma edhom bos devedhek lien an werin benelek?
I would like to say, before the body of this wild work, a massive thank you to Lucy J Wright, who wrote the incredible “Folk is a Feminist Issue” manifesta, which you can (and should) read. This is an essential in the growing body of folk feminism/feminist folk work and writing.
Historically, the domain of recording folklore has been dominated by men of varying degrees of emic and etic. The vast majority of the ‘sacred texts’ of folklore as an academic field are written by men, and the collections edited and published by women are frequently more and more niche as they are ignored. In some cases, those collections are stripped of gender so their author is an initial and surname.
The trend continues with folklore spilling onto the digital scene during the 2020s, with the most rapidly-growing accounts on sites like Instagram being run by men or run anonymously. This isn’t even touching on the added dimension of folklore of a county or country being relayed through the lens of an outsider—an etic perspective that lacks the nuance and local knowledge held by the population from where it came. I’ve not enough fingers to count how many times I’ve come across a piece of folklore that seems bizarre, contextless, happening in an unpeopled land (except for its principle characters), only to find it’s a story from down the road or over the hill: places richly populated with people who have a myriad of oral retellings of said folklore, each with a distinct flavour and set of additions that can only come when a story has been told and retold over generations. The drolls are alive and well for those with ears to hear, to steal a phrase often used by the new digital wave of internet presences.
On top of the distinct gendered divide in who is popular and who is not in digital folklore spaces, there is the sexism of folklore itself. While there is a strong and wide current of women reclaiming folklore for themselves and recontextualising the scorned, crazy, and wayward women as people operating under a hostile patriarchal system while encountering the delicious and promising Other, the core of the most popular titbits have an unerring thread of misogyny. Folkloric women are set up for consumption: the fighting fairy woman of Bodmin is presented as an un/real figure to gawk at through time, Tammy Blee’s very real life and exploits has become a fun story from which profit streams.
This is just Cornish folklore; the story repeats and repeats across the Atlantic archipelago: women turned to stone for dancing on the wrong day only to have tourists rubbing their hands all over them, witches hung on the hilltop and their deaths feeding a tourist industry, mad old women wandering the streets like ghosts through time to codify the elderly feminine body as unruly and abhorrent, women at large presented as lazy and irrational and temptable.
And who profits? Who gets the most likes? The most followers? The most digital influence? It won’t be the women reclaiming the stories, who get branded as woo, or even worse as ‘new age’ and lumped in with a litany of conspiracy theories and bigoted ideas of how the world works. It’ll be the nice and respectable menfolk, who’ve always been nice and respectable, and whose distance lends them an air of logic and reason that keeps folklore from biting too hard, or revealing too much. The kind of menfolk that systemically benefit from the marginalisation and misogynistic othering of folkloric women’s bodies. Of course, sexist and sanitised algorithms are also to blame, amplifying what is already amplified, taking the steam out of ‘dangerous’ or ‘risky’ folklore snippets. (It makes you wonder how you can share all the dark and gross and gritty bits of folklore on platforms like that. That wonder is solved with the realisation that people simply don’t, the threat of a shadow ban too scary.)
It is just a deep and true shame that the potential of the folklore revival—to make what was once denigrated as primitive or superstitious or country ways for everyone, to reclaim oral histories as a powerful voice for the marginalised and minoritised, to make the green lands of the Celtic nations and their Albion neighbour welcoming for all, to create cultural identity free from ethnonationalism—was quickly forgotten when followings could be built off it and sponsorships gained and personal wealth enriched, all while the people that live folklore are forgotten. But none of that turns a profit.
It turns even more of a profit when you cut out the middleman (ahem) and turn to AI to generate your art and captions, sod those reading and sod the great wealth of folklore artists eking a living on the unpopular fringes of real folklore. It’s much more fun to present folklore as a dangerous weapon that tells tales of lands that are hostile, dangerous, hungry, and cruel. To present as such is profoundly out of touch with what the folklore that talks about dark tales and cruel spirits is there for: a warning against debasing the land; a warning against forgetting humans are one part of a vast world; an oral legacy of the impact and ramifications of enclosed lands, of capitalism’s destructive tendencies, of the privatisation and division of domestic and farm labour into women’s work. Folklore are stories to make sense of the weird, wonderful Other, an imaginal world of vast possibility which all kinds of Other People inhabit, and in which all kinds of other ways of being are open to us. They are also lessons and a look into the misogynistic world we are striving to leave behind.
And so the future of folklore must be feminist. It must adopt the tenets of feminism.
We do not live in a time where women are hung as witches, although the tactics of the witch hunts continue as a well-used machine to divide working classes along sexist lines, the latest iteration of which in digital folklore spaces is the harassment of women that do the great sin of simply not agreeing with the commodification and shallow representation of folklore propagated across the digital landscape. Wielding social capital gained from folklore commodification as a tool to batter dissent, especially dissenting women, is why folklore must be feminist.
We also do not live in a time where we fear the elderly feminine body as abject, the home of evil and a reminder we all too will die. We should work towards a world where we don’t view the youthful woman’s body as an endless natural resource-like magical reservoir of healing (something that continues through the modern folktale of ‘I can fix him’ narratives).
We do not live in a time or world that should be allowed to cut women out of the modern folklore tapestry either, and should never let folklore or people in the folklore space (on or offline) be exempt from feminist critique. Open feminist dialogue and discourse is a curative to the closed and silencing patriarchal system. Refusal to engage in physical or diverse folklore spaces, except those that provide a profit incentive or can be monetised, is to wilfully engage in isolationism/ independency borne from patriarchal and capitalist-motivated fragmentation and enclosure of communities. Folklore is communal storytelling; indeed, it is community itself. It is the last of the commons.
In a time where femininity and womanhood is being increasingly driven back to a sexist idea of women as inherently more prone to emotional flights of fancy and to the mystical, as barefoot pregnant trad-wives—all of which seeks to frame women akin to natural resources to be plundered (in the same way folklore has been framed as something to be sold)—we particularly must be active in our commitment to feminism as liberation. We must either actively resist Othering women as mystical, and fall into the trap of reason and logic as supreme, or drag everyone into the Other and recognise it as nothing so mild-mannered as the portrait that has been given to us, to instead recognise it as something vivid and rich and wild-willed and, I reckon, something that will save us all.
The patriarchal systems of logic and reason are not a lens through which folklore can be lived and experienced, they function as a gaze that objectifies folklore and endeavours to make it into neatly-portioned and cohesive narratives to sell on to tourists. Folklore is pluriform and numinous. Each retelling shifts the narrative in a way so deeply unique to the teller that it’s impossible to consider any one version the Ultimate Truth or Singular Narrative. The teller’s language and emphasis changes to reflect the audience. Duffy might be a selfish lazy woman if the audience is predisposed to misogyny, as one would be with the systemic patriarchy we live under, but she can just as easily become a woman who doesn’t fancy wasting her life in the shackles of domestic labour to an audience engaged with feminist struggle. She shifts from lazy, slacking, and childish to a woman deeply disinterested in the chores of the household and far more interested in social affairs—a veritable icon, to borrow slang.
A feminist folklore means that to rekindle living with folklore as part of life is essential to stop it becoming a commodity to be sold. It means fighting the capitalist effects of alienation with a wild and joyful embrace of, frankly, weird and unpleasant and strange and delightful and tantalising and inviting folklore; embodying the lackadaisical playful folkloric woman who fobs off work to mess about, barter devilish deals, slip into other worlds, but most importantly always find her way home to her community; embracing and uplifting the vast community of women offline, online, past, and present that have put massive amounts of labour into recording folklore, into finding folklore, into making folklore, into being folklore.
It means to put the common folk back into folklore and recognise that folk is feminist, to reclaim folklore as a path to collective liberation—a feminist path to liberation.
Let me have the delight of harping on that a bit more: there’s no folklore without liberation, without remembering folklore comes from the common folk, the working class, without recognising the role women and FLINTA* people play in the heart of folklore—as the witch, the trickster, the piskey, the fairy in the woods, the queer body at the heart of the tales of Other places and Other worlds.
The body of folklore is the same as the body of women: the last things that remain unenclosed, a last boundary that defies the taming and mollifying attempts of the Church of Reason and Logic. Unlike the body of women, the ground and monuments in the body of folklore have fallen victim to the restriction and removal of access that accompanied the original enclosures (funded by colonialism and the transatlantic slave-trade as they were). They have been cut off and covered up and rendered unreal, unpeopled. The same fate is looming over folklore itself.
When folklore becomes unpeopled and detached from its communal roots, it ceases to be FOLKlore. Folklore cannot be owned by any man because it is the last of the commons: unenclosable as long as someone can remember a story or spin a whole new one.
My a vynsa leverel, kyns korf an ober gwyls ma, meur ras bras dhe Lucy J Wright, neb a skrifas an derivadow marthys “Folk is a Feminist Issue”,a yllir (ha talvos) redya. Res porres yw hemma y’n korf ow moghhe a skrifa hag ober yn benelegorieth werin/gwerin benelek.
Yn istorek, kovadha lien gwerin re beu gwarthevys gans gwer a radhow dyffrans a emyk hag etyk. Skrifys gans gwer yw rann vrassa a’n ‘tekstow sans’ a lien gwerin avel testen akademek yw skrifys gans gwer, hag yn fenowgh yth yw an kuntellow golegys ha dyllys gans benenes moy kudhys ha ni ow skonya aga aswon. Yn nebes kasys, genedh yw pilyes a’n kuntellow ma mayth yw aga awtour lytheren ha hanow teylu.
An tuedh a bes gans devera lien gwerin war an bys bysyel y’n 2020ow, gans an akontys hag usi ow tevi uskissa war leow kepar hag Instagram restrys gans gwer po restrys dihanow. Ny wra hemma hogen tochya war an tu keworrys a dherivas lien gwerin neb pow po bro dres gwedrik estren—gologva etyk gans fowt a’n skeusliw ha godhvos leel synsys gans an poblans le may teuth anodho. Nyns eus genen besies lowr dhe nivera an myns a brysyow may teuth vy erbynn rann lien gwerin a hevel koynt, digettesten, ow hwarvos yn tir heb tus (marnas y fugdus chyf), ha trovya y vos hwedhel an fordh war-nans po dres an vre: leow poblys yn rych gans gwerin ha dhedha dashwedhlansow diniver der anow an lien gwerin na, kettep gans blas diblans ha set a geworransow na yll dos marnas pan veu drolla hwedhlys ha dashwedhlys dres henedhow. Bew ha yagh yw an drollys rag an re gans diwskovarn dh’aga klewes, rag ladra lavar usys yn fenowgh gans an donn nowydh bysyel a dus kesrosweyth.
Pella es an ranna diblans der enedh hag yw byw ha nag yw a vri yn spasow lien gwerin bysyel, yma reydhgas lien an werin y honan. Kynth eus fros krev ha ledan a venenes ow tasperghenegi lien gwerin rag aga honan ha daskettestenegi an benenes skornys, muskok ha gorth avel tus owth oberi yn-dann gevreyth tasrewlek eskarek hag i ow metya an Aral dentethyel ha leun a bromys, yma neusen gompes a vengas dhe golonnen an temmyn denti. Settys yw benenes yn lien gwerin rag konsumyans: diskwedhys yw an venyn fay omladhel a Vosvena avel figur an/wir rag lagatta orti dres termyn, bewnans ha gwriansow gwir Tammy Blee re dheuth ha bos drolla delitus may fros budh anodho.
Hemm yw lien gwerin Kernow hepken; an hwedhel a dhasson ha dres enesek Atlantek: benenes chanjys yn men rag donsya war an jydh kamm saw dhe berthi tornysi orth aga falva, gwraghes kregys war benn an vre ha’ga mernansow ow maga diwysyans an dornysi, muskogesow koth ow kwandra an stretys kepar ha spyrysyon dres termyn dhe godifia an korf benow koth avel direwl hag ahas, benenes dre vras avel diek, direson ha dynyadow.
Ha dhe biw yw an budh? An moyha layks? An moyha holyoryon? An moyha delanwes bysyel? Ny vydh an benenes ow tasperghenegi an hwedhlow, merkys avel woo, po gwettha avel ‘oos nowydh’ ha fardellys gans letani a dybiethow kesplottyans ha tybyansow ragvreusek a fatel ober an bys. Y fydh an wer wordhi, re bons pupprys wordhi, gans pellder a re dhedha ayr lojyk ha reson hag a lett lien gwerin rag bratha re gales, po diskudha re. Gwer a’n par a gemmer prow yn systemek a’n amalekheans ha’n aralheans bengasek a gorfow benenes yn lien gwerin. Heb mar, dhe vlamya ynwedh yw awgrymow reydhgasek ha purhes, ow moghhe an pyth hag yw moghhes seulabrys, ow tenna dhe-ves oll an ethen a-dhyworth temmyn lien gwerin ‘peryllus’ po ‘argollus’. (Y hwra dhis omwovyn fatel yllir kevrenna oll an temmyn tewl ha divlas ha growynek a lien gwerin war leurennow a’n par na. Assoylys yw an omwovyn gans an aswonvos na wra tus, yn sempel, godros an difen skeus yw re skruthus.)
Meth dhown ha gwir yw y feu possybylta dasserghyans lien gwerin—gul rag pubonan pyth o unweyth dispresys avel prymytyv po hegol po fordhow powdir, dasperghenegi istoris der anow avel lev nerthek a-barth an re amalekhes ha lyharivhes, gul dhe diryow glas an kenedhlow keltek ha’ga hentrevek Albion bos wolkommus rag peub, gwruthyl honanieth gonisogethel heb ethnogenedhlogieth—ankevys yn uskis pan allsa bos sewyansow drehevys warnodho ha meughyansow gwaynys ha rychys personek moghhes, hag an dus a vew lien gwerin ankevys. Mes ny wayn tra vyth a henna budh.
Y hwayn kemmys moy a vudh pan dreghir an maynor (ahem) ha movya dhe SK rag dinythi art ha geryans, dhe’n jowl gans redyoryon ha gans an bush bras a artydhyon lien gwerin ow kravas bewnans war oryon a lien gwerin gwir. Lieskweyth moy didhanus yw presentya lien gwerin avel arv peryllus a hwedhel drollys a diryow yw eskarek, peryllus, nownek, ha fell. Presentya yndelma yw estrenhes yn town gans porpos lien an werin a gows a hwedhlow tewl ha spyrysyon fell: gwarnyans erbynn iselhe an tir; gwarnyans erbynn ankevi bos tus unn rann a vys hujes; kemmyn der anow a’n strokas hag omskorrenansow a diryow argeys, a duedhow kisus chatelydhieth, a’n privethheans ha rannas a lavur an bargen tir ha’n chi yn ober benenes. Lien gwerin yw hwedhlow dhe ri styr a’n Aral koynt ha barthusek, bys dysmygel a bossybylta kowrek mayth yw anedhys gans pub egen a Dus Erel, mayth yw ygor dhyn lies eghen aral a vos ynno. Dyskansow yns i ynwedh ha golok a-ji dhe’n bys bengasek mayth eson ni owth assaya gasa war agan lergh.
Hag ytho y kodh bos devedhek lien an werin benelek. Y kodh dhodho degemeres brysyow benelogorieth.
Ny wren ni bewa yn oos mayth yw benenes kregys avel gwraghes, kyn pes taktegow helghow an gwraghes avel jynn usys yn ta dhe ranna renkasow-oberi a-hys linennow reydhgasek, gans an daswrians diwettha a hemma yn spasow lien gwerin bysyel avel an arvedh a venenes a wra an pegh meur a dhisakordya gans an gwaregyans ha kanasedh vas a lien gwerin lesys dres an tirwedh vysyel. Handla chatel gwaynys a gommoditegyans lien gwerin avel toul dhe fetha dissent, dres oll benenes ow tissentya, yw prag yth yw res dhe lien gwerin bos benelek.
Ynwedh ny wren ni bewa yn oos le may perthyn own a’n korf benel henavek avel fiadow, tre an drog ha kovadh y hwren ni oll merwel. Y tal dhyn ni oll oberi war-tu ha bys le ma na wren ni gweles korf an venyn yowynk avel kreunva hudel didhiwedh a sawyans kepar hag asnodh naturek (neppyth a bes der an hwedhlow a lien gwerin arnowydh ‘my a yll y ewnhe’).
Ny wren ni bewa yn oos po bys le mayth yw amyttys treghi benenes a dapestri lien an werin arnowydh naneyl, ha ny dal dhyn nevra gasa dhe lien gwerin po tus yn spas lien an werin (po warlinen po meslinen) dos askusys a varn benelek. Keskows ha dadhel venelek ygor yw yaghus orth an system tasrewlek degeys hag a wra tawhe. Nagh kemeres rann yn spasow lien gwerin fysygel po divers, marnas an re a re kentryn budh po hag a yll bos arghansegys, yw kemeres rann a-borpos yn enysegans/distakter dinythys a omvrewyans hag argeans kemenethow movys gans chatelydhieth ha tasrewl. Lien gwerin yw hwedhla kemenethel; yn hwir, kemeneth yw y honan. An diwettha rann a’n kemynyow yw.
Yn prys mayth yw beneleth ha benynses herdhys war-dhelergh moy ha moy orth tybyans reydhgasek a venenes avel moy gostyth yn genesik orth sians amovyansek hag orth an rinek, avel tradwragedh torrek treys noth—hag oll a hemma a vynn framya benenes avel asnodhow naturek dhe vos pyllys (yn keth fordh may feu lien gwerin neppyth dhe vos gwerthys)—yn arbennik yth yw res bos bew y’gan omrians orth benelogorieth avel livrans. Res yw dhyn po sevel orth Aralhe benenes avel rinek, ha kodha y’n vaglen a reson ha lojyk avel ollgallosek, po draylya peub y’n Aral hag y aswon avel tra vyth mar glor y vaner dell yw an portrayans res dhyn, hag yn le y aswon avel neppyth glew ha rych ha gwyls y volonjedh ha, dell brederav, neppyth a wra agan sawya oll.
Nyns yw an systemow tasrewlek a lojyk ha reson neb gwedrik may hyll lien gwerin bos bewys ha klewys dresta, i a ober avel golok hag a wra taklenegi lien gwerin hag assaya y wul yn hwedhlow kesklenus ha kompes aga darnasow rag bos gwerthys war yew orth tornysi. Lien gwerin yw liesfurv ha riniethek. Pub dashwedhlans a janj an hwedhel yn fordh mar dhown hy unikter dhe’n hwedhler dell yw anpossybyl gweles unn gwersyon avel An Gwir Diwettha po An Hwedhel Unnplek. Yeth ha poos an hwedhler a janj dhe dhastewynnya an woslowysi. Y hyll bos Duffy benyn dhiek honanus mars yw an woslowysi ragstummys orth bengas, dell via gans an tasrewl systemek mayth on trigys yn-danno, mes mar es y hyll hi dos ha bos benyn na vynn skollya hy bewnans y’n kargharow a lavur chi rag goslowysi a aswon an omladh benelek. Hi a janj a dhiek, syger, ha floghel dhe venyn fest heb bern y’n gweyth anhweg a’n mayni ha gans lieskweyth moy bern yn taklow socyal—ikon gwir, rag chevisya nebes yeth isel.
Lien gwerin benelek a styr bos res porres dasenowi bewa gans lien gwerin avel rann bewnans rag y lettya rag dos ha bos kommodita dhe vos gwerthys. Y styr batalyas gans effeythyow kevalav a estrenegyans gans byrlans gwyls ha lowenek a, heb wow, lien gwerin koynt ha divlas hag estren ha hwegoll ha tantalus ha meur y dennvos; omgorfa benyn lien gwerin mygyl jolyf neb a vynch a ober rag gwibessa, ferya bargenys dyowlek, slynkya yn bysow erel, mes yn posek trovya an fordh tre dh’y hemeneth pub tro; byrla ha drehevel an gemeneth efan a venenes meslinen, warlinen, y’n passys ha lemmyn neb re worras myns kowrek a ober yn kovadha lien gwerin, hwilas lien gwerin, gwruthyl lien gwerin, bos lien gwerin.
Y styr gorra an werin arta yn lien gwerin hag aswon bos lien gwerin benelek, dasperghenegi lien gwerin avel hyns dhe livreson kuntellek—hyns benelek dhe livreson.
Gas vy an delit a gana an hen gan rond yn kever henna tamm moy: nyns eus lien gwerin heb livreson, heb perthi kov y teu lien gwerin a dhyworth an werin, an renkas-oberi, heb aswon an rann wariys gans benenes ha tus FLINTA* yn kolon lien gwerin—avel an wragh, an tollor, an bocka, an fay y’n kosow, an korf kwir orth kolon an hwedhlow a tylleryow Aral ha bysow Aral.
Korf lien an werin yw an kethsam tra ha korf an benenes: an diwettha taklow hwath heb bos argeys, neb or diwettha hag a dhefi an assays dofhe ha medhelhe a’n Eglos a Reson ha Lojyk. Dihaval orth korf an benenes, an meyn kov ha’n dor yn korf lien an werin re dheuth ha bos fethesik orth strothans ha dileans hedhas hag eth gans an an argeansow derowel (arghesys gans trevesigeth hag an chyffar kethyon treusatlantek dell ens). I re beu treghys dhe-ves ha kudhys ha rendrys anwir, heb pobel. Yma an keth tenkys ow kodros lien gwerin y honan.
Pan dheu lien gwerin heb pobel ha digelmys gans y wreydh kemmyn, y hedh bos lien GWERIN. Ny yll bos lien gwerin perghennys gans den vyth drefen bos an diwettha a’n kemynyow: anargeadow hedre vo nebonan neb a yll perthi kov a hwedhel po nedha onan nowydh yn tien.
Moy Ahanan – More From Us
- The Future of Folklore is Feminist – Devedhek Lien an Werin yw Benelek by Ealhstan
- Kernow Agan Bro: Join our Demonstration for Devolution – Omjunyewgh gans agan Diskwedhyans a-barth Digresennans by Kernow Rydh
- A Conversation with Bernard Deacon: Direct Action- Keskows gans Bernard Deacon: Gwrians Didro by Sordya
#anWerin #benelogorieth #Breus #Cornish #Cornwall #feminism #folklore #Kernewek #Kernow #Kernowek #lienGwerin #opinion #reydhgas #sexism #Sordya #thePeople
