Voices Halloween_mixdown
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Merrill Kaplan: Might look at a smaller group of people, and say, you know, what is Philadelphia doing, or like, what is this group of friends doing, or even just take an interview with one person in particular, it's like, well, what is your deal with Halloween? Why this costume, what are you saying?

What does that have to do with who you are, and what are you trying to communicate? 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry And biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening.

Join us to find out what's new, now.



David Staley: I'm pleased to be joined today in the ASC Marketing and [00:01:00] Communication Studio by Merrill Kaplan, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Folklore Studies at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. Her specializations include Old Norse and Icelandic literature, folklore, both on and off the internet, especially pre industrial narrative traditions of Scandinavia. Dr. Kaplan, welcome to Voices. 

Merrill Kaplan: Thank you. Great to be here. 

David Staley: And we are recording this in preparation for Halloween, and I know that as a folklorist you have a scholarly interest in Halloween, so I want to ask a couple questions about Halloween, to begin. First of all, why do we have Halloween?

Merrill Kaplan: Why do we have Halloween? 

David Staley: Why do we even bother with this holiday? 

Merrill Kaplan: Oh, I mean, what is not fun about Halloween? Lots of things are great about Halloween. It's kind of a remarkable holiday because it doesn't have a central narrative, it doesn't have a central figure, we're not celebrating a particular event.

It's not in memory of anybody, it's just this sort of, many limbed festival in which all age groups [00:02:00] have roles, and they can be very different roles, and we age into one set of traditions, and out of another. All of them are fascinating, some of them are rebellious, some of them involve costume, some of them involve destructive things, some of them involve food, some of them involve guising, the going door to door and...

David Staley: Disguise, yeah. 

Merrill Kaplan: In costume. Well, it's specifically being in a marked dress, disguise of some kind and making house visits, going house to house and asking for some kind of thing, possibly in return for a little dance or a little tune or something like that.

Even if it's as short as just trick or treat you know, or the longer version from when I was a kid, at any rate, trick or treat, smell my feet, give us something good to eat. That is a... 

David Staley: You and I might be the same age.

Merrill Kaplan: It's possible. It's possible. I think some of that is still around. But there's just so much, and then there's the folklore about Halloween that is sort of encrusted around it. Beliefs about Halloween, beliefs about the contamination of candy. 

David Staley: Razor blades. 

Merrill Kaplan: [00:03:00] Right. 

David Staley: Yes. 

Merrill Kaplan: Which is more beliefs and narratives that circulate than a custom that is actually done, and I'm saying custom in a very sort of technical way.

We talk about that more than it ever happens, and then there's the joke tradition around that, that is riffing on that. So, stay tuned, you're going to see lots of jokey things on the internet about people saying, you know, " look out this Halloween, my kid found the ring to rule them all in their Halloween candy," " my kid found critical race theory in their Snickers bar". And so, it just is this endless sort of hall of mirrors of tradition and commentary and the commentary is itself folklore. 

David Staley: Is there any similarity there with other holidays? I mean, that sort of, you know, panoply of customs and those sorts of things: is there anything like that? Christmas, let's say. 

Merrill Kaplan: I mean, Christmas has got a lot going on as well, christmas and New Year's, if you put them together, certainly. Older forms of Christmas used to be a lot more like Halloween, so there had been a really robust [00:04:00] custom of some guising and of kinda chaotic partying in the streets, possibly in costume, there's some of that still in Philadelphia, the Mummers Parade, and some of that guising and mumming has sort of fallen out of American tradition in connection with Christmas, though there may still be caroling, and you go caroling, you do a little performance, and you're hoped to be asked inside and given a little bit of hot cider, you know, or hot chocolate, and then you go on your way.

So that has something to do with an older guising and mumming tradition. There's still some regional stuff like Belsnickling, which is in the U. S., but some immigrant German cultural heritage areas have got at least echoes, still, of getting up in kind of outlandish disguises, outlandish garb and going house to house and doing a little jig and sort of scaring the children.

T here's still, you know, some costume and going house to house with Christmas in places where someone [00:05:00] dressed as Santa might make visits, aside from the coming down the chimney and, you know, eating your food part. This is more a European thing at this point, but there's older customs about and older narratives about Father Christmas being accompanied by a more demonic figure, some representation of the devil. And, in some places, that's still active in Europe and there is this sort of, especially in someplace like Holland, there's this unfortunate slippage between, is this a dark figure morally or is this a dark figure racially, and the figure of Zwarte Piet is very contested.

David Staley: Yeah.

Merrill Kaplan: And that is also fascinating and a thing for folklorists to look at, wears blackface.

David Staley: That wears blackface, yeah. 

Why do we wear costumes at Halloween? 

Merrill Kaplan: Why do we? See, because I have folklorist training, I want to push back with a question to that: by "why", do you mean what is it doing [00:06:00] for us, what does it mean, or do you mean, where does it come from? 

David Staley: How about both? 

Merrill Kaplan: How about both? Okay. 

David Staley: Let's start with where does it come from?

Merrill Kaplan: Where does it come from? 

Dressing for Halloween has changed over time. If you looked at costumes before the 50s, that's before Hollywood and horror really becomes part of, sort of the horror stuff comes in in the 70s is my understanding, and Hollywood monsters kind of come in the 50s.

If you roll it back further, kids would come house to house in kind of old clothes, or their parents clothes, you know, cast off things, sort of raggedy and outlandish, and it's more about disguise than dressing up as something in particular. It's a, I'm dressed as not me, rather than I'm dressed as something in particular.

There's this longer tradition that has changed over time, and it hasn't always been about [00:07:00] taking on other identities, it has been about masking identity. 

David Staley: You've said here at a number of points because you're trained as a folklorist, and I'd like to spend a moment talking about that.

What does that mean? You're a folklorist who's looking at Halloween: how is that different, say, from a historian like myself? 

Merrill Kaplan: Right. See, I kind of just did a history thing. 

David Staley: Yeah. 

Merrill Kaplan: Like, where does this come from, and there's certainly a how have things changed over time aspect to what folklorists do or what some folklorists do.

But, we also look at things in the moment as culturally meaningful. So, with something like costumes, you know, what, where, why do we do the costume thing at Halloween? And a folklorist might look at anything from what for this society, like what is this society, what is the thing that the society is working through for itself, what is the thing that the society is getting done by dressing up in costume on this day every [00:08:00] year, and might look at this in this really big way, where we're looking at, like, what is the deal with the U. S. that the U. S. is doing this? What is the deal with North America that it is doing this?

Might look at a smaller group of people, and say, you know, what is Philadelphia doing, or like, what is this group of friends doing, or even just take an interview with one person in particular, it's like, well, what is your deal with Halloween? Why this costume, what are you saying?

What does that have to do with who you are, and what are you trying to communicate? 

David Staley: As a historian, I might go to an archive, for instance, to conduct my research. Are folklorists using archives, or is there another approach here? 

Merrill Kaplan: There are two approaches, and I'm kind of an old school archives person, possibly because I'm shy. And that is certainly part of it, but I'm also interested in the past, and I'm interested in diachronic change, change over time. And so, I like rummaging around in the dust and finding the old stuff and looking at the old handwriting [00:09:00] and learning something about what was going on in some other century.

That's a little out of fashion, but I'm okay being a little out of fashion because I'm also a medievalist. The other thing that folklorists do is they go out and talk to people right now, or go out and participate in, observe customs and festivals and things like that and find out what's going on now.

What is the cultural meaning of things right now, wherever they come from or whatever they meant in the past? They wouldn't be going on now if they didn't mean something now. So there's both; that is kind of interesting to me. 

David Staley: So that first approach, that sort of older approach, you say it's out of fashion: why? 

Why do you think it's out of fashion? 

Merrill Kaplan: Oh, yeah. Well, this is some disciplinary history for you. So, folklore studies used to be very much about the past because our understanding was that things in the present that we were labeling folklore - and then we had a more narrow idea of what folklore was at the [00:10:00] time - the things in the present were the remnants of the things we were really interested in that had been around in the past. So, when a folklorist or an antiquarian saw some custom in the present and thought, that's weird, I don't understand that, the default explanation was, well, they go, oh, well that's a survival, that's a remnant, that's a fragment of something that made sense sometime in the past, and then they would try to reconstruct what it must have been when it was actually like some robust pagan religion or something like that, and they kind of tended to default to that sort of thing. There was a big correction, because a lot t of that doesn't work, like, sometimes things are survivals, but things exist in the present because they're meaningful in the present also.

People are not machines, we don't just like automatons keep doing what we've always been doing. Things are meaningful to us, that's why we keep doing them, and the reason that we're doing them may change over time. Your grandmother may have done something for one reason and then you do it maybe because grandma did it because it's [00:11:00] meaningful to you because it was a grandma thing and grandma's not around anymore.

So, even if you succeed in finding out, like, why grandma was doing it, that doesn't necessarily tell you much about why the granddaughter is doing it, which has everything to do with her personal relationship with this person who is no longer around in her life. So that was kind of off to the side a little bit, but not really.

There was a big correction in especially the 60s and 70s when there was a big shift from thinking about the folk, the people who are transmitting the folklore as almost machine like, transmitters or kind of naive passers on of the material that we were interested in, and then we're just sort of fortunate that they in their naive way are automatically reproducing. 

David Staley: There's no agency.

Merrill Kaplan: Yeah, exactly. No agency. There's like, hey, wait a second, these people have agencies and separate personalities and their own motives; let's talk to them and actually write down who they are when we collect material from them.

[00:12:00] Let's start thinking about them as more collaborators than just informants, sources, and let's put in the context around the stuff, and think more about the folk as individuals and as specific groups with, yeah, agency and motives and artistic agency, artistic talents and skills.

The individual mark put on something is not something we should be sort of polishing away to find out what it, you know, it used to be in the past, but something that's meaningful to that person, maybe a group of people and worthy of study in its own right. 

David Staley: So, you've a new book out, _The Paganesque and The Tale of Vǫlsi, _and I'd like you to tell us about this research, please. 

Merrill Kaplan: Alright. Hang on, because this is kind of niche. At the end of the day, it's about story and what people use story for and how story is something that people think with, to kind of think across boundaries; stories as ways that we think about the relationship between past and [00:13:00] present, between self and other, us and them, the everyday and the supernatural, that, you know, if there's a, if there's a hard core to the kind of zillion things that I do, and sometimes I feel like it's too many things, that may be it. That may be it. 

This story is a story preserved in a 14th century Icelandic manuscript, and it's a story that tells about a group of still pagan people in northern Norway who are doing a spooky pagan ritual. They are still heathen, they are unconverted and the King of Norway, who is one of the kings Olaf, and both kings, Olaf, their shtick is that they are... this is the former one, but they're both famous as missionary kings.

They are the ones that convert Norway, not always in a nice way. But the king of Norway, Olaf, in the south hears that heathenism is still active in the North and he goes charging up there, and shows up at this thing as a [00:14:00] guest in disguise, they don't know that he's the king.

And he witnesses the most remarkable thing. He witnesses the woman of the household, the old woman bringing out with great ceremony a preserved, pickled, magically animated, named, horse penis. 

David Staley: Oh my goodness.

Merrill Kaplan: Right, yes. Immediately gets your attention. 

David Staley: How could it not? 

Merrill Kaplan: Right. Says a verse over it, that includes a little couplet about, you know, "may the Mǫrnir, may the giantesses accept this offering, and now you, my husband, take this vǫlsi" - the thing is named vǫlsi - "from me". And he takes it, and he says a verse over it with the same refrain and passes it to the next person, and it goes around like this until it gets to the king, who remarkably also says a verse over it, also says may the giantesses accept this offering and then throws it to the dog who runs off with it.

The old woman is horrified by this and says, you know, help me, help me, how can I save the sacrifice? It [00:15:00] doesn't work, of course, the king leaps up, reveals himself, it is Olaf, and he converts everyone to Christianity. So, it's obviously a story to make Olaf look good. It is an episode in a larger saga of the king, which is all about making the king look good, and specifically look good in terms of bringing the true faith to Norway. It's also clearly a story that is about making paganism look bad. Because it's such a detailed description of something that purports to be a pagan ritual, scholars have gotten very excited about it, and so a lot of the scholarship about the tale of Vǫlsi is, is this reliable as a source of information on what pre Christian religion in the north looked like. The technology of writing comes in with the church, and so we don't have written sources by people who worshipped Thor and Odin, so, it's reasonable to get excited about something. It's like, oh, you know, is this reliable? Is this a survival of information? I mean, this sometimes happens into the Christian [00:16:00] period, that would be fantastic. Big debate; no consensus. Two camps, one that says, it's too good to be true and it's too gross to be true, I mean, this is clearly just, you know, this person didn't know anything but came up with the grossest thing that he could come up with and that's it. And there's the other camp that says, no, this is the real deal. This is a memory of an ancient fertility ritual, 

Diabolically animated pickled horse penis being passed around, what else could it possibly be about? You know, you have a... it's phallic worship. So, the center of this is, you know, the male reproductive organ and therefore this is about reproduction, therefore this is about fertility, and ah, ah, this is fantastic. We have a source about what people before the introduction of Christianity might have been doing to ensure the fertility of livestock and the fertility of the fields. That's the story. That's sort of the narrative itself and also like the scholarly stories, what people have been telling themselves and each other this means. 

David Staley: So which [00:17:00] side of that debate do you fall? 

Merrill Kaplan: I think it's the wrong debate. 

David Staley: Oh. 

Merrill Kaplan: Yeah. 

David Staley: I thought you might say that. 

Merrill Kaplan: Yeah, I think it's the wrong debate. First of all, we've come to a standstill. Second of all, I think there's some other questions that we can ask here, independent of whether this resembled something that actually happened in the past in a religious context. Why did the person who this narrative to parchment think that it was gonna land as something that felt pagan, that had this aesthetic, that had a literary effect that said this is a religious thing, but it's not a Christian thing and it's bad? So, this is why I come up with this word, the paganesque, to label an aesthetic, the aesthetic, and this is the fancy, you know, unspooled way of talking about it, an aesthetic of negatively valued religious alterity.

So, something that feels religious, something that [00:18:00] feels contrastive with the hegemonic religion, in this case it's Christianity, and something that's valued negatively. It's got those elements, we can call it paganesque, and that's more, that's a little more efficient. So, that's my word, that's my title, and the case that I make in there starts off with, you know, hold up everybody just because there's a penis in the middle of the room doesn't mean that it's the most important thing in the story, or that it has anything to do with fertility. If you walk through the student district in the middle of winter, first snowfall, second snowfall, every student house, somehow, the whole student district, everyone has decided to run out and erect a giant snow penis. Apropos folklore, like, this is a tradition. 

David Staley: Today? 

Merrill Kaplan: Today. This does not have to do with fertility. This is because it's hilarious.

David Staley: Right.

Merrill Kaplan: Right? 

David Staley: They're students.

Merrill Kaplan: They're students, and it's a little bit of rebellion and it's, you know, it has to do with obscenity and it has to do with you know, some of the comic possibilities.

But if we imagine, you know, [00:19:00] folklorists from Mars coming down and be like, Oh, there's a fertility ritual happening in the outskirts of OSU's campus, and apparently everybody else's campus, you know, they'd be dead wrong. And we would laugh at that, that's just absolutely wrong.

So it's, in part thinking of that kind of modern stuff, like look around, there's a lot of dirty stuff around and very little of it is about, you know, let's ensure the fertility of the fields and, you know, the reproduction of livestock. So, maybe a grain of salt there. But then looking after like, what are the ingredients that made this seem Pagan, contrasted with Christianity, inimical and religious. And if you want a comparative, you know, if you think about if you were asked to dress someone up or dress a set, you know, decorate a room, throw a party that seemed witchy, you would know how to do it. You know the elements to make something witchy. And it doesn't actually have a lot to do with anyone who was accused of anything at Salem. 

David Staley: Right. 

Merrill Kaplan: But it's an aesthetic. You know how to do it. 

David Staley: Pointy hats, wart on the nose. 

Merrill Kaplan: Wart on the nose, you know, [00:20:00] black cats, you know, a whole bunch of stuff. And some of it, you know, there's an historical relationship to beliefs in the early modern period, some of it doesn't, but it's an aesthetic. It comes together, and like, that's witchiness. You can do it, you can just put it in a movie, you can just throw a party and it's witchy. I'm trying to, you know, find, take apart, you know, what's paganesque, what's about this scene, and the short answer is I think it's made of folklore.

I think it's made of folk belief, and I think it's made of forms of traditional verbal dueling, I think it's made of folk legend, and put all together, there's a belief element because there's bits of folk belief in there, there's an understanding of how the verses the characters in the story exchange with each other and make sense as a practice, as a scene of performance; they make sense together if you understand forms of verse contests that are attested later [00:21:00] that can also be obscene and teasing and funny. So, I'll dig down on this just like a little bit more. There's a custom in the Faroe Islands, attested much later, called passing the drunnur. 

David Staley: Very high up in the North Sea. 

Merrill Kaplan: So, yeah, the Faroe Islands are right between Norway and Iceland. 

David Staley: Pretty cold. 

Merrill Kaplan: It's pretty wet. It's more wet than it's cold. You know, a lot of sheep. And it's not practiced so much anymore, but there was this, really, a party game called passing the drunnur, and a drunner is the preserved tail of a sheep, kind of connected to some of the backbone. And it was decorated with ribbons and such like, and it would be placed in front of the guest of honor at a meal, and then they were obligated to say some little verse over it that always ended with the name of the next in line to take the drunner, who is then obligated to make a little verse.

And that verse may also be insulting or teasing of the next person in line who then gets the drunner and has to make a verse, [00:22:00] and so on and so on, and it's very light hearted. Now, of course, later folklorists have looked at that and looked at my story and said, Oh, oh, oh, this is a survival of an ancient fertility ritual, and I just sort of hold my head and say, maybe not. Maybe it's not that the drunnur game is a survival of the ritual and the tale of vǫlsi and that all of them are survivals of ancient pagan fertility rituals. Maybe the game, the party game was already current in the 14th century in Iceland, and it was something that could be made an ingredient of a paganesque scene, a scene that looked religious, that looked contrastive with Christianity and looked negative.

If you read it that way, and you read all these verses, they stop looking so much like the liturgy of some religious ceremony, although there's clearly some riffing on the idea of liturgy. It looks more like the old woman who kicks off this ritual says the one serious [00:23:00] verse, and everyone else is playing the party game.

They don't want to be there, they're following the rules of this party game that we know from later and they're teasing each other, and some of them are good at it, and that's impressive, and some of them are bad at it, and that's funny, and when it finally gets to the king, the shocking thing happens where he also repeats this refrain, may the giantesses take this, you know, the thing that makes it seem religious and pagan, the thing that codes it as like because religious, but unlike, contrasted with Christianity. He says the thing, which is like, this is an offering to giantesses, and then he throws it to the dog. Like, how is that okay? He's the conversion king. And then you look again at the refrain, may the giantesses accept this.

And maybe there's a little double meaning there, and when he says it, may the giantesses take this - devil take this thing, and he throws it to the dog. And so, he's actually the best at this verbal dueling of all of them, because he gets to put this little double meaning twist on it, and it's like, [00:24:00] somebody throwing back an insult that's been given to them with this little twist and it becomes this tremendous zinger. So, he ends this game with a tremendous zinger, shuts it down by throwing this terrible object to the dog, and then wins on a spiritual level by converting everyone to Christianity.

David Staley: Spoiler alert. 

Merrill Kaplan: That's chapter two. There's more in there. 

David Staley: I introduced you as someone who works on folklore, both on and off the internet, and I know you've just recently published or about to publish a book chapter that's looking at Twitter, and I'd like to hear a little more about this, folklore on Twitter. 

Merrill Kaplan: Folklore on Twitter. Social media is full of folklore. 

David Staley: Hmm. 

Merrill Kaplan: Folklore is informal traditional culture. It's the culture we make for ourselves, and some of it is, yeah, oral tradition, it's face to face communication, but, If you think about folklore and your association with the oral tradition, it's because you have sort of the survival, the remains of a 19th century idea about folklore when it was thought to be something that kind of the [00:25:00] peasantry in the countryside had. And we knew that it was, you know, naive and uncultured and all that kind of thing because they couldn't read, because there was not as much literacy in the countryside, and so they were not influenced or corrupted by learned, you know, or, heaven forfend, foreign influences.

The whole history there is a little distasteful at times, but, you know, we continue to work our way through it. I think we're better at what we do because we're very conscious of that. But literacy is super widespread now, and so informal traditional culture, informal person to person communication, we have all sorts of media at our disposal.

We do it through texting, we do it on Reddit, we do it on social media, we send email, all kinds of things. So, any means of communication that we have, we will use it to transmit folklore, among other things. These days, that folklore is less likely to be a whole folktale, but it may be a rumor, it may be a joke, and it may be, oh, did you hear this story that other people say is true or [00:26:00] other people say is happening, but of course we know better, but, you know, you just told the story too. It may be that kind of stuff, these sort of conversational genres, which I'm very interested in.

Nobody on Twitter or on social media starts with, let me tell you a story, everybody gather round. Everybody gathering round is not as available on social media either. But the conversational genres, the things that pop up in the context of less patterned communication, things that are not folklore, that are just communication, that are just getting things done.

Jokes, rumors, they pop up and they go away and they're not framed with this, "let me tell you a story", or necessarily the "did you hear the one about", though sometimes they are. So, it's full, it's full of folklore, and some of it's visual because we pass around jokes that are visual in the form of memes and photoshopped pictures and all manner of things.

David Staley: Is folklore on the internet or on social media different from other types of folklore? 

Merrill Kaplan: The medium always matters. 

David Staley: Yeah. 

Merrill Kaplan: Folklore that [00:27:00] is transmitted orally has some characteristics that are just dictated by the medium, and we, think of that as unmediated, but there is a medium.

There's air, there's our voice, and you can do certain things with your voice that you can't do with letters on a screen. There are things you can do with letters and other symbols on a screen that you can't do with your voice. What a more communications or STEM type person might call the technical affordances are different, but all that means is that the capabilities of the medium always matter. And whatever they are, people will exploit them to the fullest to create meaning and to communicate ideas. 

David Staley: Why are you a folklorist and not an historian or, I don't know, a sociologist or something like that - why did you end up in folklore? 

Merrill Kaplan: Why did I end up in folklore? I have various stories about this and all of them are true, but some of them contradict, and I think that that is fine. The one answer to that, I think, is that my interest in stories is [00:28:00] especially in the stories that are sticky.

David Staley: Sticky. 

Merrill Kaplan: Sticky. That keep getting repeated. I'm not a literature person in terms of contemporary literature, I'm interested in medieval literature, but medieval literature also is in this tradition of reproduction, where it's copied over and over by hand from manuscript to manuscript, and a lot of it is anonymous. This is a little like folklore, where a lot of it is anonymous, and it's just repeated, and you heard it from a friend of a friend, and it's just kind of in the air, it's going around, it's gone viral, it's become a thing. And when something has become a thing, or gone viral, or become traditional in a continuity over time way, it's meaning something for a larger group of people than just one author who's trying to do something as original as possible, that's really just kind of about that one author who's trying to do something as original as possible.

David Staley: Mm. 

Merrill Kaplan: And the stuff that's not very [00:29:00] original, the literature people may not like it, but it's saying something like, this is meaningful to enough people that it's going around, and so maybe we should figure out what that is. 

David Staley: Merrill Kaplan, thank you. 

Merrill Kaplan: Thank you.

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.