Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang 1844-1912, English scholar and man of letters, b. Scotland. His poetry, much of it written in the forms of ballades, triolets, and rondeaux, appeared in such volumes as his Ballads in Blue China (2 vol., 1880-81). Lang was one of the first to apply anthropological findings to the study of myth and folklore; his best work in this field was Myth, Literature, and Religion (1887, rev. ed. 1899). He is known for his prose translations of the Odyssey (with S. H. Butcher, 1879), and the Iliad (with Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers, 1883), and for his defense of the unity of Homer in The World of Homer (1910). With his wife, Leonora Blanche Lang, he translated and adapted traditional stories for children, published in his Blue Fairy Book (1889) and others. Lang also wrote literary and art criticism, a biography of J. G. Lockhart (1896), and several works on Scottish history, culminating in his History of Scotland (4 vol., 1900-1907). His poetical works were edited (1923) by his wife.

Bibliography: See biography by R. L. Green (1946, repr. 1973).

Lang, Andrew (1844–1912), born at Selkirk, was educated at St Andrews University and became a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. In 1875 he settled in London, becoming one of the most prolific and versatile writers of his day.

His first book of verse, Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872), was followed by several others, including Ballades in Blue China (1880, 1881). Many of his poems were written in the old French forms of rondeau, triolet, etc. Discouraged by the poor reception of his ambitious narrative poem Helen of Troy (1882), his verse became increasingly lightweight. His Collected Poems (4 vols) was published in 1923. Lang appears to have valued himself most as an anthropologist, and he published various volumes on mythology and folklore.

As a Greek scholar Lang devoted himself largely to Homer. He was one of the joint authors (with S. H. Butcher) of prose versions of the Odyssey (1879, preceded by his well-known sonnet, ‘The Odyssey’), and (with W. Leaf and E. Myers) of the Iliad (1883). He wrote three books on the Homeric question, arguing the unity of Homer. He also took part in the Baconian controversy in Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown (1912).

His many works of belles-lettres and reminiscences are now largely forgotten as are his melodramatic novels, which include The Mark of Cain (1886). As a critic he showed a distinct preference for romantic and adventurous works such as those of Haggard, A. Hope (Hawkins), and A. C. Doyle.

He is now perhaps best remembered for his own fairy tales, which include The Gold of Fairnilee (1888, set in Scotland), and Prince Prigio (1889, set in Pantouflia), and for his collections of fairy tales, each volume named after a different colour; the first was The Blue Fairy Book (1889).

folklore. Despite the presence of what might be described as folklorists avant le mot, such as William Camden (1551–1623) and John Aubrey (1626–97), folklore as a discipline really became established early in the 19th cent. Its immediate origins are in German scholarship, with the works of the brothers Grimm being of central importance, the coining of the English term ‘folklore’ being attributed to W. J. Thoms (1803–85) in 1846. By the later 19th cent. folklore was an established, and in many ways scholarly, field of study. Its practitioners included enthusiastic amateurs, many of them country parsons and the daughters of the gentry, and such major figures as Andrew Lang (1844–1912), and Cecil Sharp (1850–1924), whose researches into folk-song and folk-dance were of lasting significance. The coming of age of folklore in England was symbolized by the founding of the Folk-Lore Society in 1878.

At its widest, folklore was an all embracing discipline, attempting to comprehend the totality of ‘traditional’ culture. Defining what traditional culture is in this context can be contentious, but, generally, folklorists have concentrated on forms of culture transmitted orally or by imitation. So the folklorist will study such elements of the oral culture as songs, stories, proverbs, and riddles, the broader social phenomena of games, ceremonies, and rituals, and also the products of material culture, including buildings and all sorts of artefacts. The early work was on peasant culture, and folklore still seems to be a discipline which flourishes best when the rural world is being studied: Sharp's work, indeed, is to some extent distorted by an idealization of the English ‘peasant’. Work on the folklore of industrial workers and their communities, notably of miners, does, however, indicate some of the broader possibilities of folklore studies.

In its search for the origins of human behaviour and its interest in the ‘primitive’, 19th-cent. folklore had much in common with the anthropology of the period, and some of the founding fathers of the latter discipline, notably Sir Edward Tylor (1832–1917) and Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), drew on ‘folkloric’ sources in their attempts to imagine primitive humans. Yet folklore in England did not become institutionalized as a university discipline in the way that anthropology was, and there are still few British (and more particularly English) universities which offer it as a degree subject.

Folklore's relationship with history remains problematic. Many historians, especially those working on mainstream political or economic history, seem to regard folklore as an ill-defined and unrigorous subject whose eclecticism denies its status as a serious discipline. Yet this seems unduly harsh on a field of study which, despite its appeal to the amateur, has at certain points created high standards of scholarship, for example in the analysis and classification of folk-songs and folk-tales. With the broadening of the subject-matter of history, there are now many historians, particularly cultural historians and those social historians interested in the history of mentalité, whose concerns are very similar to those of the folklorist. Both groups study ‘culture’ defined in a broad, anthropological sense, and concern themselves with customs, orally transmitted culture, the significance of folk-tales, and material culture.

Thus although the grand theory and the search for the origins of human culture in the ‘primitive’ of the late Victorian folklorists, and the eclecticism of later practitioners, may not be to the taste of modern historians, a dialogue with folklore, or at least the incorporation of elements of human behaviour studied by folklorists, can enter the historian's agenda.

J. A. Sharpe