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"The Rules of Folklore" in the Ghost Stories of M.R. James
Folklore, Annual, 1997 by Jacqueline Simpson
This does not mean, however, that he was in sympathy with the dominant group among folklorists of his time, the comparative anthropologists and mythologists, with their sweeping theories and universalist explanations. They are lampooned in the person of the sinister Mr Karswell in "Casting the Runes," who is author of a History of Witchcraft and a paper on "The Truth of Alchemy" about whom one of the other characters in the story comments:
There was nothing that the man didn't swallow: mixing up classical myths, and stories out of the Golden Legend with reports of savage customs today - all very proper, no doubt, if you know how to use them, but he didn't; he seemed to put the Golden Legend and the Golden Bough exactly on a par, and to believe both: a pitiable exhibition, in short (James 1970, 258-9).
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That is fiction, written in 1911; in 1917 James raised the same issues in all seriousness against no less a scholar than Jane Harrison, when she wrote a paper linking the dance of Salome and the beheading of John the Baptist to the dance of Agave with the head of Pentheus in the Bacchae as "the dance of the daimon of the New Year with the head of the Old Year, past and slain." After countering Harrison's arguments, James commented:
I have often viewed with very grave suspicion the way in which comparative mythologists treat their evidence ... I regret to see that a researcher of her experience can allow herself to make public crude and inconsequential speculations of this kind, which go far to justify those who deny to Comparative Mythology the name and dignity of a science. I believe it to be a science, but only in the making. I also believe that one of the worst services that anyone responsible for the direction of young students can do them is to encourage them to make it the subject of dissertations, or to propound any theory concerning it. Loose thinking, exaggeration of resemblances, ignoring of differences, and downright falsification of evidence, are only a few of the evils which a premature handling of it fosters in its votaries (James 1917; cf. Pfaff 1980, 255-6).
These are stern criticisms, which went against the intellectual fashions of the day but which we can now see were largely justified. If that was "the science of folklore," then James certainly had no wish to call himself a "folklorist." At the same time, he knew that a practical knowledge of folklore was useful when reading old texts. He was quite willing to explain the curious way that in Scandinavia and Germany the feast-day of St Stephen was linked to horse-fights and racing as reminiscent of the cult of Frey (Pfaff 1980, 133). When he edited Walter Map's De Nugis Curialum in 1914 he regretted his lack of expertise on "romance and folk-lore" which prevented him from offering an explanatory commentary, while for his translation of the same work in 1923 he enlisted the help of the folklorist E.S. Hartland as editor and annotator. In 1922 he published some fascinating accounts of ghostly encounters which he had discovered as addenda (in Latin) in a medieval manuscript from Byland Abbey in Yorkshire, using comparisons with nineteenth-century Danish beliefs to explain certain obscure points (James 1922). Towards the end of his life, he translated some of Hans Andersen's fairytales (James 1930). He described one of his fictional narrators (who, as usual, seems to be a self-portrait) as one who had "dabbled a good deal in works of folk-lore" (James 1970, 517). And most significantly, he declared in the Preface to the collected volume of his ghost stories that, although he was not conscious of being indebted to any specific local legend whether written or oral, yet he had "tried to make my ghosts act in ways consistent with the rules of folklore" (James 1970, viii). This is the aspect of his work which I wish to explore here.
It is not, however, the most immediately obvious aspect. A reader who sets out to analyse the flavour of an M.R. James story will surely always be first conscious of the antiquarianism to which his titles drew attention - the easy familiarity with a world of college libraries, old manuscripts, rare books, cathedrals, private chapels, and so forth. Allied to this is the skill in literary pastiche, producing such delights as the sermon on mazes in "Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance," the transcript of a supposed trial by Judge Jeffreys in "Martin's Close," and several similar though briefer passages. Underlying this, one can glimpse personal susceptibilities to particular aspects of the horrific - spiders, thinness, hairiness, hooded figures and linen drapery are recurrent motifs. James himself gave one deliberate piece of information as to the origins of his ideas. As a child he had seen a toy Punch and Judy set with a cardboard Ghost:
It was a tall figure habited in white with an unnaturally long and narrow head, also surrounded with white, and a dismal visage. Upon this my conceptions of a ghost were based, and for years it permeated my dreams (James 1931).
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