Folk is for Everyone
By Bethany Wilshaw
Hello everyone, I thought I’d best kick off this blog series! I’m Beth, founder of Sheffield Folklore Society. It’s January and right now and low and behold, it’s freezing and I’m feeling a bit melancholy, so to cheer myself up, let’s have a chat about folklore!
At its heart, folklore is about people. Ordinary people. Stories are told in kitchens, places of work, songs are sung in pubs and traditions passed down through families and friends. It shouldn’t’ be locked away in museums or stored only in books, it should be lived and shared.
That’s why accessibility and inclusivity matter so much when we talk about folklore. Folk traditions belong to all of us, no matter your background, class, age, or education. You don’t need to be an expert, you don’t need to be a “folklorist”, and you certainly don’t need permission. Folk only survives when it’s open and welcoming.
During the Victorian era, folklore was enthusiastically collected, which is obviously great, but often by middle and upper class scholars who filtered it through their own values. Songs were “cleaned up”, stories changed to fit a certain narrative, dialect removed and rough edges smoothed away. What had once been living and messy, was often turned into something more polite and presentable.
This wasn’t always done with bad intentions, but it did mean that a lot of folklore became disconnected from the people and places it came from. Voices were lost and variations of it disappeared. Folk culture became something to study rather than something to do. Part of keeping folklore alive now is coming together as a community and letting foklore be strange, political, funny, rude, sad and joyful.
One of the things I love most about British folklore is how it’s still part of everyday life. It’s in place names, pub signs, local sayings, customs that we’ve just always done and annual events people take part in without ever calling them folklore.
Look at well dressings, wassailing, football chants, bonfire traditions. Look at how people mark birth and death, honour the harvest, and protest for what they believe in. Folk culture hasn’t vanished, it’s just changed shape. You don’t have to go searching through ancient manuscripts, you just have to listen.
This is why creating folklore societies, especially local ones like ours is so important. They give people a place to gather, share stories, celebrate the weird and the wonderful and ask questions while doing it. But most importantly, they bring us together, they keep folk culture alive.
Folklore doesn’t survive because it’s preserved. It survives because people care enough to share it.
