The Boggart

Folklore, History, Place-names and Dialect
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-1-905816-90-3
Verlag: University of Exeter Press

Buch, Englisch, 330 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 721 g

Reihe: Exeter New Approaches to Legend, Folklore and Popular Belief

Honourable mention for The American Folklore Society's Wayland D. Hand Prize for outstanding book combining historical and folkloristic methods and materials.

Runner up for The Folklore Society's 2022 Katherine Briggs Award for most distinguished contribution to folklore studies.

The little-studied and once much-feared boggart is a supernatural being from the north of England. Against the odds it survives today, both in place-names and in fantasy literature—not least the Harry Potter universe. This book pioneers two methods for collecting boggart folklore: first, the use of hundreds of thousands of words on the boggart from newly digitized ephemera; second, about 1,100 contemporary boggart memories from social media surveys and personal interviews relating to the interwar and postwar years.

Combining this new data with an interdisciplinary approach involving dialectology, folklore, Victorian history, supernatural history, oral history, place-name studies and sociology, it is possible to reconstruct boggart beliefs, experiences and tales. The boggart was not, as we have been led to believe, a ‘goblin’. Rather, ‘boggart’ was a much more general term encompassing all solitary supernatural beings, from killer mermaids to headless phantoms, from black dogs to shape-changing ghouls.

The author shows how in the same period that such beliefs were dying out, folklorists continually misrepresented the boggart, and explores how the modern fantasy boggart was born of these misrepresentations. As well as offering a fresh reading of associated traditions, The Boggart demonstrates some of the ways in which recent advances in digitization can offer rich rewards.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Young, Simon

Young, Simon, Dr.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Volkskunde: Sitten, Traditionen, Mythen, Legenden

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Abbreviations

Illustrations and Maps

Acknowledgements

Preface

Part I: Situating the Boggart

1. Boggart Definitions and Sources

2. Boggart Origins

3. Boggart Distribution

Part II: Lived Boggart Folklore

4. Boggart Landscapes

5. Boggart Beliefs and Transmission

6. Social Boggarts

Part III: The Death and Rebirth of the Boggart

7. Boggart Death

8. The New Boggart

Conclusion

Appendix: Boggart A–Z

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Young, Simon, Dr.
Simon Young is Cambridge-educated with a doctorate from the University of Florence. He has taught at universities in Tuscany for some fifteen years. In 2023 he was runner up for the Katharine Briggs Prize and for the Wayland Hand Prize, and won the Brian McConnell Book Award in that year. In 2023 he also won a Curran Fellowship.

Simon Young is a British folklore historian, based in Italy. He has a longstanding interest in the study of the supernatural. In 2017 he edited Magical Folk (2017) with Ceri Houlbrook, and has published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in Folk Life, Folklore, Gramarye, Supernatural Studies, Tradition Today and other journals.