Hello everyone! This is Casimir, and I am finally back with a new article today. I hope you all weren’t too disappointed with my absence, but I am glad to be able to say I am back to writing these articles again and will be writing an article a month at least! Today I’ll be talking about a bit more of a sobering topic, one that makes me both sad and angry. That topic is about Fakelore.
All of us who are interested in the stories of those who came before us eat up every bit of information that we can find. For the most part, it is normally pretty easy to find the information that is actually historical for Celtic, Norse, Greek, and a few other cultures. However, for a few others, including Slavic folklore which you all know is near and dear to me, there is a void of information. As humans, we have a tendency to want to fill in gaps. When one loses a tooth, I’d argue it’s more likely than not that you would stick your tongue in the gap, because the gap is bothersome. Something used to be there, and now, it’s not. Fakelore arises from this gap; sometimes it is simply ignorance that creates fakelore. Other, more sinister possibilities, are when a government or organization creates fakelore to sway people a certain way by manipulating stories. This is discussed in Folklore and Fakelore: Some Sociological Considerations by William S. Fox. This is one of the many reasons that responsible storytellers, listeners, and scholars need to keep their eye open for fakelore.
With fakelore, it’s normally rather easy to pick out the fakery because of the lack of any cohesion with other extant examples of folklore. It’s a problem in a few cultures; One here in the US was the “Legend of the Rainbow Warriors” a fakelore story about the Hopi, or Cree Native Americans, and it supposedly tells a prophecy that was eaten up by white people in the early 70s. Native American scholars were quick to point out the discrepancies. However, in that case there are a good amount of Native American stories still around (we have even recorded a few). My favorite, or should I say, least favorite example of fakelore is from Eastern Europe.
In Eastern European folklore there is not a lot in information written down, so in the early 20th century when someone came forward with a supposed book that was written by Slavic Pagan priests in the 8-9th century, people leapt at the chance to reclaim their history. Hope, at times, can be blinding. Supposedly, the book was written by pagan priests who wrote it down in opposition to their Christian rulers. This all sounds plausible, so far. A detailed description of the story can be found in Ante-Kiev in Fantasy and Fable. The assembled version of the book by Aleksandr Asov claimed a variety of things about the early Slavs: supposed they originated in what is now Russia, then moved their way to India, and then they moved back to Russia. The claims behind this is that the Slavs were the original Indo-Europeans, the original Aryans. Scholarly sources in the west, and even in Eastern Europe denounce the book as nonsense, especially since the original copy of the book mysteriously disappeared, as is normally the case fakelore. However, the damage had already been done, as the story had already begun to spread through popular sources in newspapers and later in the 20th century in xeroxed copies of Sergei Lesnoi’s 1966 version of the Book of Veles. From the point of a culture who believed that their culture was destroyed by Western Europe, specifically by Germanic scholars, the Book of Veles was a godsend. It gave Slavic Europe the place in history that they felt they deserved. From this, even more absurd Slavicized and Russianized versions of history arose that claimed that the Rus were many different cultures throughout history, with one bizarre and ridiculous case claiming that they Russians founded Jerusalem, all because of the spelling Jer-RUS-alem. Any scholar who attempted to put down the stories was accused of “historical suppression”.
Overtime logic prevailed in most cases. However, in Ukraine the Book of Veles was taught in schools up until 2008, even though it had been denounced by scholars nearly since its release. This is the danger that fakelore presents, not just disinformation, that happens more often than not, especially in our era of the internet. The danger is instead in the belief that scholarly sources shouldn’t be trusted because of bias, and that the false attractive information can be used to spread a nationalistic agenda. I would like to close with a quote that I feel sums up the danger of fakelore, and the using of history to spread an agenda.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Isaac Asimov
I hope you have enjoyed our discussion of mythology folklore, and history on History with The Skald’s Circle. If you’d like to know more, or perhaps discuss it with me I’m always more than willing. Also, if you have something you would like us to research, please let us know! If you learned something new, give us a like, and let us know, we really appreciate being noticed… Until then, I’ll be back next week with another fascinating topic. This is Casimir, signing off, and remember, always check your sources very very carefully. Our culture and our history depends on it.
Sources:
- Fox, William S. “Folklore and Fakelore: Some Sociological Considerations.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 17, no. 2/3 (1980): 244-61. doi:10.2307/3813897.
- Bushnell, John. “Ante-Kiev in Fantasy and Fable.” The Slavic and East European Journal 45, no. 2 (2001): 275-88. doi:10.2307/3086329.