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CONTENTS 

From the Editor .................................................... 2 

1989 AFS Conference Papers 

“‘I Believe in Santa Claus, But I Know He's Not 
Real’: The Role of Ambivalence in Belief” 
 Judith Haut .............................................................. 3 

“The Tooth Fairy: Perspectives on Money and Magic” 
 Tad Tuleja ...............................................................13 

“‘Show Biz’: Performance and Text in the Children's 
Show” 
 Elizabeth Wein ....................................................... 23 

CFS: 1990 Annual Meeting................................ 29 

Reviews 

All in Together, Girls: Skipping Songs from Regina. 
Saskatchewan by Robert Cosbey 
 Edith Fowke ........................................................... 33 

Sue Samuelson (1956-1991) 
 Simon Bronner…………………………………………34 

Notes and Announcements ................................. 35 

Cover: This month's cover is the front of the Lifetime Achievement 
Medal which the Children' s Folklore Section commissioned from 
artist Armond Szainer. 

1 



 

FROM THE EDITOR. . . 

As some of you know, the Secretary-Treasurer and the 
CFR Editor have been less than rigorous about dropping names 
from the mailing list for non-payment of dues. When we sent 
out a four- to eight-page newsletter, we could afford to be 
generous. Mailing out a journal, however, is a somewhat more 
expensive proposition. Therefore, we are attempting to do two 
things: one, advertise the journal in hopes of attracting new 
members (individual and institutional); and two, update the 
current list of paid memberships. Help us out. If you know of 
institutions (especially university libraries) or individuals who 
should be receiving this journal, please encourage them to 
subscribe. Also, if you have been receiving CFR without having 
been a paid member for a while, please send in your money. 
Even at $10.00/year (see 1990 meeting minutes), CFR is a good 
deal. 

The Spring 1991 issue contains more papers from the 
Children's Folklore paper session at the 1989 AFS Meeting (see 
13.1 for the Newell Prize papers from that session). These are 
followed by the minutes from the 1990 meeting of the 
Children's Folklore Section at the American Folklore Society 
Meeting in Oakland where, as Oakland was losing the 
World Series, the members present met to consider some 
important changes in the way the Children's Folklore Section is 
structured. This volume concludes with a short version of 
Simon Bronner's JAF obituary for Sue Samuelson, one of the 
founding members of the Children's Folklore Section, who died 
in January of 1991. She will be missed. 

Once again, we are encouraging members and others 
interested in children and their lore to send in materials (see 
inside back cover for details), and we are open to suggestions 
for future issues and conference panels. 

With the second volume in this new format, we become a 
bit more competent at desk-top publishing. East Carolina 
University has been generous in providing the computer, laser 
printer, and program for this endeavor and in assigning Tina 
Moore, the English Department's Graduate Studies Secretary, to 
this project. The success of CFR depends in no small measure 
upon ECU and Ms. Moore. 

C.W. Sullivan III 

2 



 

"I Believe in Santa Claus, But I Know He's Not Real": 
The Role of Ambivalence in Belief 
Judith Haut 

Until my daughter was six years old, she spoke of knowing 
that Santa Claus was not real: "It's just someone dressed up, 
isn't it?" But one December evening in 1987, while we sat 
watching a television movie about Christmas, she made some 
comments suggesting that she had reassessed her own ideas 
regarding the physical reality of Santa Claus. Responding to her 
words, I asked her, "Do you believe Santa Claus is real, or do 
you know Santa Claus is real?" Without hesitation she 
answered, "I know Santa Claus is real." I remember being 
surprised at her assertion because it was without reinforcement 
from us; we do not celebrate Christmas. 

More recently I asked my now eight-year-old daughter 
whether she believes Santa Claus is real or whether she knows 
Santa Claus is real. She said, "I believe Santa Claus is real." I 
asked her to explain the difference between the two statements. 
She answered, "If I say, 'I know' that means I am sure, that I've 
seen it or something. 'I believe,' that means it's possible.''2 

As I will demonstrate in this article, belief is a construct 
through which people can express a sense of possibility, or 
perplexity, or personal commitment3 Even though they may 
recognize disconfirming evidence, people can also choose to act 
"as if" they believe (cf. Dandridge 144-146; Opie and Opie 210; 
and Toelken). Any evaluation falling between the extremes of 
"probably true" and "possibly untrue" may be characterized as 
an expression of ambivalence: in short, the co-existence in one 
person of opposing emotional attitudes about an object, 
phenomenon or concept. 

Ambivalence may be the quintessence of the construct 
belief. Although this inference arises from my analysis of data 

from individual and group interviews with children,4 I 
assume that it also applies to adult conceptions. In the following 
discussion I will account for some of the reasons people might 
express ambivalence. It may, for example, result from noticing 
disconfirming evidence; or it may arise out of an awareness of 
peer pressure or other social expectations. Finally, I will 
hypothesize about the ramifications of ambivalence for belief 
and folklore studies. 

First, however, it is important to characterize terms. I use 
the noun beliefs (or a belief) to refer to people's actual expres- 

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Haut 

sions of belief; i.e. statements or actions which the speaker or actor classifies 
as belonging to the category, belief.  Belief, like knowledge, is a construct, 
specifically a conceptual category. Belief, like knowledge, is a part of 
normative mental functioning. As cognitive constructs, both belief and 
knowledge are subject to the same dynamic, emergent forces underlying any 
and all conceptualization. 

But this is not to say that belief and knowledge are indistinguishable. As 
one twelve-year old girl told me, "Facts you are sure of; a belief some people 
would be sure of and some people wouldn't." In other words, the children I 
interviewed generally categorized phenomena or ideas as belief not on the 
basis of topic, but on the basis of two interrelated axes: individual assessment 
and perception of others' assessments. Although the categories belief and 
knowledge rest on the same cognitive functions, to try to use them 
synonomously, as Black suggests in "Belief Systems" (511), is to ignore an 
important emic category for speakers of American English. Therefore, I use 
belief and knowledge as closely analogous constructs representing 
overlapping classifications; I further assume that an individual's 
categorization of phenomena or concepts may readily shift between belief 
and knowledge. 

Of course, once we recognize the role of ambivalence it becomes 
difficult to study belief as if it were a rigid category. As people's doubts are 
resolved or their questions are answered their conceptual categories may 
shift. Moreover, when we take ambivalence into account it becomes difficult 
to study belief as if it were fully represented by isolated propositions, as 
belief study has so often been approached in the past. Philosophers Quine and 
Ullian, for example, argue for a direct manner of divining belief or what a 
person believes: they write, "The criterion is the obvious one: the man assents 
to the sentence when asked" (5). But how can any person communicate the 
complex nature of conception simply by assenting or affirming a sentence to 
be true? Let me illustrate the difficulty of this notion. 

At age eight, Simon was one of the youngest children in my study. 
During my initial conversation with his mother, she told me that she never 
encouraged her children to believe in things like Santa Claus or the Tooth 
Fairy. Her older son Lyndon, who also participated in my study, echoed these 
sentiments. Thus, when Simon first responded "I do not believe" to my 
written questionnaire items regarding the Tooth Fairy, I hypothesized he was 
expressing his family's overt consensus about such fantasy figures. 

In a subsequent individual interview, however, Simon discussed the 
Tooth Fairy within the rubric of belief. During our discussion he told me that 
he had heard about the Tooth Fairy from his mother and his friends. He 
explained, "You're always asleep when she comes." Then he added, in what 
sounded like a puzzled tone, "I'm surprised that you don't get waked 

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Santa Claus 

up." He continued, "You could put this bell on top of the door, and then it's 
tied with a siring on top here; and then they open the door and 'm.' And when 
it goes down to the bottom, it goes 'clang' and you wake up." I asked, "And 
that would be a good way to find out what?" He answered, "If the Tooth Fairy 
is the Tooth Fairy." 

Simon's statement--"If the Tooth Fairy is the Tooth Fairy"--leads to an 
inference that Simon entertains the possibility, however slight, that the Tooth 
Fairy has corporeal existence. I further infer that his conception must have 
included some uncertainty because there is no reason to posit a test for 
something about which the individual has no doubt. 

Although anthropologist Benson Saler also characterizes belief as "a 
proposition, meaningful to an individual, which the individual affirms to be 
true" (30), he also acknowledges the useful dimension of uncertainty or 
doubt. He asks, "In what domains of their meaningful universe do our in-
formants display the greatest toleration for uncertainty? Where the least? 
What might be the significance of the allocation? And what, indeed, might be 
the social functions of doubt" (33)? Doubt, as a component of ambivalence, 
plays a major role in an individual's construct of belief. 

Ambivalence may result from noticing disconfirming evidence. As such, 
ambivalence is an outgrowth of experience in the broadest sense of that word 
and may be the basis for a child's actively wondering. In this sense, 
ambivalence, or more properly dissonance, is also an incentive or impetus for 
seeking information or experience or at least being receptive to new 
information. 

Perhaps ironically, ambivalence may also be the means whereby children 
can ignore disconfirming evidence. The children I interviewed expressed their 
uncertainties as they talked about their changing conceptions and the 
difficulty of squaring those new conceptions with all the information. At 
times, the children worked arduously and consciously at making new data fit 
During a group interview, for example, Alice, Gary, Sam and Barbara were 
discussing things that they "used to believe, but don't now." During a 
discussion about Santa Claus, Barbara turned to Gary and asked him, "Do you 
believe in Santa Claus?" He said, "I used to." I asked, "Do you think you still 
believe a little bit?" He said, "Yeah, I sort of do. A little bit." "Which tiny 
bit?" I asked. Gary's reply provides an illustration of how he fits "facts," or 
his concrete experiences, into his changing conception concerning Santa's 
actual existence. He said, "Well, see, I don't urn think that much that urn that 
my mom and dad could wrap all those presents in one night Cause they have 
to go to sleep too." 

His older sister Alice interrupted, "I don't think they do it all in one. 
Sometimes I'll go in their closet months before, and you'll see all these 
presents wrapped." Gary didn't even look at his sister as he continued, "But 
see they can't do it when we're at school because Mom works at school, 

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Haut 

and then they do errands and stuff." Alice, her words slightly overlapping 
Gary's, said, "They can do it at night." Gary said, "Dad's at work." In an 
aside to me, Alice said that she used to tease her brother by saying that 
Santa was not true. She concluded, "So he had a big belief that it was true, 
because he wouldn't even believe it when I said it wasn't true." 

It may take an enormous amount of disconfirming evidence before 
paradigms, personal or otherwise, change. This seems to be the state of affairs 
in the scientific community, as Barnes describes in "Paradigms: Scientific and 
Social," the members of that profession shoehorn discordant data into existing 
paradigms until they are moved to change those paradigms because they 
recognize the growing anomalies or until there is an alternative theory which 
will serve as a paradigm (100). 

Similarly, people do the same with their individual paradigms. In the 
discussion I quoted above, for example, Gary tries repeatedly to "fit the facts" 
into his existing conception of Santa Claus, conception which seemed heavily 
marked by ambivalence. Acknowledging, or at least verbalizing, that Santa is 
not real, Gary nonetheless wonders how his parents could possibly be 
responsible for all the presents. He is working very hard to maintain the 
possibility of Santa Claus' existence in the face of the disconfirming evidence 
which his sister Alice presents to him. Gary's conceptualization is very much 
affected by his perception of peers', parents' and other people's assessments of 
various phenomena and ideas which he might categorize as belief. 

I suspect that as children grow older, they learn to reject-verbally, at 
least-age-inappropriate notions about fantasy figures. This is akin to Gordon 
Allport's delineation of the stages of prejudice in which the older child 
verbally accepts but behaviorally rejects other people (292-295). During one 
interview, for example, one twelve-year-old boy told me privately that he has 
a lucky penny. He did not want the other children to know, for fear that they 
would think it was "a little kid thing to do." Expressions of this kind of social 
awareness illustrate the self-awareness that is part of both conceptualization 
and the children's own responses to their age-peers and siblings. In other 
words, there is a strong social dimension to ambivalence. 

Other researchers have noticed the ambivalence with which some 
children discuss fantasy figures. In general these researchers have addressed 
ambivalence only in terms of the transition between believing and not 
believing. 

In their studies of the developmental progression of children's belief 
regarding imaginery figures such as Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the 
Easter Bunny, for example, Norman Prentice, Martin Manosevitz and Laura 
Hubbs categorize a child as being in the transitional stage "when the child 
was tom between belief and disbelief, presented 'facts' and reasons that 

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Santa Claus 

both proved and disproved Santa's existence" (620; see also Blair, McKee 
and Jernigan). In his dissertation, entitled "On Discovering the Truth: 
Children's Reactions to the Reality of the Santa Claus Myth," Carl Anderson 
reports the unexpected finding of the "prevalence and impact of the 
transitional process from belief to doubt to disbelief' (158). 

The notion of the "transitional child" implies that this is a fixed stage 
through and out of which a child passes. Though that may be a defensible 
observation of some children, regarding selective specific topics, it fails to 
address the possibility that ambivalence may not be a discrete stage, but 
rather a lifelong element of the construct belief.  As Bern observes, "the 
consistency theorists. . . have taken the. . . step of postulating that men 
possess a drive toward cognitive consistency. . .. Inconsistency, they seem to 
be trying to tell us, motivates belief and attitude change" (34). But not all 
ambivalence is necessarily perceived as dissonance, as motivation for testing 
hypotheses. Doubt is not necessarily denial. 

For example, during a group session Alice described her personal 
experiences of first doubting, and then entertaining, the possible efficacy of 
knocking on wood. She said: 

A couple of years ago, me and my mom were walking along, and 
we were just talking; and I said like, "I haven't been stung by a bee in 
two years," and my mom says, "Knock on wood." I go, "I don't 
believe that" And I'm not kidding, the next day I got stung by a bee. 
And it's kind of coincidental or it's, it's kind of weird. 

I asked Alice, "So would you say it is something that you would believe in 
now? Like would you knock on wood if someone says, 'nothing bad ever 
happens to me'?" Alice answered: 

Yeah, I'll knock on wood, but I'm not positive I'll believe it But I 
still knock on wood. Like last night I was lying in bed just thinking, and 
I was thinking, I kind of had this weird feeling. I was thinking about 
dying and stuff, and I said, "I hope I don't die," and I knocked on wood. 
I had to do it. I was just lying there, and I said, "I don't have to do this." 
And like ten minutes later I just had to do it." 

For Alice it is not simply a matter of "believing" or "not believing," of 
unquestioning acceptance or rejection of the advice to knock on wood. Her 
conception seems to include ambivalence, that mixture of doubt and possibility. 
Lying alone in the night, facing her own anxiety about death, she is receptive 
to considering the possibility that knocking on wood might be an efficacious 
practice. 

In short, the assumption that there is a fixed sequence--belief to doubt, 

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Haut 

doubt to disbelief-does not address belief as being a part of complex, 
transformational, cognitive processes. It is, rather, an approach that is wedded 
to assumptions about stages of development for individuals and, by extension, 
for whole societies.5  Consider the letter a grown woman left for a shopping 
mall Santa Claus in California (Thorne 4): "At 50, I get all tingly about 
Santa." Isn't it possible that ambivalence, or cognitive inconsistency, is a life-
long characteristic (cf. Bern 34)? 

Without exception, all the children in the second and third cohorts of my 
study answered my questionnaires by saying, "I know there is no Santa 
Claus." In fact, when I asked the children during one group session to give me 
lists of things they "believed" and lists of things they "knew," they chanted as 
if in a chorus, "I know there is no Santa Claus," "I know there is no Tooth 
Fairy," "I know there is no Easter Bunny." 

During that group session the children also described their gradual or 
shocking discoveries that there was no Santa Claus. It therefore came as some 
surprise to me when one participant of that session later told me that she 
wanted to change some of her questionnaire responses. Mary, who had turned 
nine during the sequence of interviews, said, "Well, I believe in 
Santa Claus, but I know that he's not real. So, I'll put 'believe' there ........ If I 
hadn't begged my dad, I would probably still think he was real. I don't know 
why, I just think he is still real even though I know he's not." I asked if she 
was sorry that she had begged her dad to tell her. "Yeah," she sighed. "It's 
funner having an imaginary thing. Even if it's not real it's still fun thinking of 
things like that." 

As part of his characterization of the different stages of belief about 
organizational symbols and the uses of those stages in organizational 
research, Thomas Dandridge delineates his notion of stage four belief. 
Describing how a person who is operating at the fourth stage of belief might 
react to organizational symbols, Dandridge writes, 

The person now acts only 'as if' he or she believed, because in doing 
so it is possible to experience closer identification with the organization. 
. .. Such a person might say, "I know the story isn't true, but it makes me 
feel good when I hear it. . .." [T]he fourth is the imaginative [stage] 
(144). 

For both Mary and the woman described in the newspaper article, it 
appears that their willingness, or need, to act "as if' Santa were real is a 
conscious maintenance of ambivalence. Even though Mary understands the 
disconfirming evidence, she has constructed a personal assessment that 
allows her to continue to "believe." 

Mary expresses her ambivalence directly. Other children express their 
ambivalence through stories or through verbalized musings that at first 

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Santa Claus 

glance may appear to contain logical inconsistencies, but which I think 
actually illustrate this "push-pull" attribute of opposing emotional feelings. 
Furthermore, ambivalence may be a dominant feature in younger children's 
accounts because they have not yet learned to deny their hope or desire that 
such fantasy figures exist; older children, on the other hand, may not express 
ambivalence even if they feel it, perhaps because they are aware of the strong 
social assessment regarding age-appropriate behavior. Finally, it is likely that 
even young children entertain doubts while simultaneously expressing what 
sounds like certainty or denial. As one of the older children in my study 
commented, "I'll bet even little kids aren't 100% positive about the Tooth 
Fairy." 

What accounts for this ambivalence? As a fundamental human charac-
teristic, the ability to entertain ambivalence may be related to the ability and 
the need to be able to deal with uncertainty. Ambivalence may be the result 
or the perception that some notions are untestable. For example, Robert A. 
Georges hypothesizes that legends are the "metaphorizations of basic kinds 
of relationships sets in which one or both parts or the nature of the relation-
ship that is conceived to exist between these parts is incapable of being 
tested to the satisfaction of every man" (18). I wish to illustrate this point in 
my last example, where I briefly characterize my observation and interviews 
with four children regarding their experiments with calling "Bloody Mary."6 

As Sam, Alice, Gary, Barbara and I sat discussing the kinds of ideas the 
children might call belief, Barbara related: "If you say at twelve o'clock, if 
you say, if you stare into the mirror and it's dark and you say 'Bloody Murder' 
one hundred times, someone, a lady will come out and chop your head off." 
The children argued among themselves, discussing just how this was done. 
They finally decided to try calling Bloody Mary that night at a sleepover. 
Although I was not present at the sleepover itself, I did return later to talk 
with the children about their attempt. 

Alice reported that they had indeed tried calling "Bloody Mary" the 
night of the sleepover. She said, "Gary and Barbara ran out of the room when 
we turned out the light. But we just couldn't do it." I asked with great interest 
why they decided not to do it. "We just started freaking out with the lights 
out," Alice replied. "It was freaky. Not totally scary like falling from the rock 
you are climbing. . . but I thought of what would happen ifit were true" 
(emphasis added). I asked her, "So did you think maybe it was true, definitely 
it was true, or completely wasn't true?" She quickly answered, "Wasn't true. 
But we were still freaky. . .. Sam got up to thirty by himself. He wouldn't go 
up to 100." Alice reported in laughter that she had left at the count of two. 

When I spoke to Sam two weeks later, I asked him if he had tried 
"Bloody Mary" during the sleepover. Significantly, he gave a somewhat 

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Haut 

ambiguous answer: "Well, just sort of, because you're supposed to say it a 
hundred times." Perhaps he felt he had not made a full attempt, since by 
Alice's reporting he said it only thirty times. "Well, we just said it a couple 
times and then we got too scared," he said, laughing a bit (perhaps nerv-
ously). 1 asked if they had made the room dark. "Yeah," he replied. "There's 
these big mirrors on the wall, and so we, uh, [shudder] too scary." He added 
that he had tried it alone, then with Alice and Barbara; Gary did not want to 
try at all. "What made you scared to do it?" 1 asked. Sam replied, "I don't 
know, just the fact that it might be true" (emphasis added). Then he laughed. 

Perhaps children entertain the possibility that "it might be true" because 
the stakes for a full test are so high. Who wants to go up to one hundred and 
risk head-chopping? As Michael Owen Jones, observes, "Most of us in daily 
life have occasion to operate in terms of metaphors and by means of untested, 
inadequately tested or untestable hypotheses" (3). Ambivalence is an 
outcome of living with untested hypotheses. If beliefs can be thought of as 
hypotheses, then there may be something In the nature of an untested-or at 
least as yet not disproved-hypothesis that perhaps contributes to people's 
expressive continuities through time and space that we study as folklore (cf. 
Georges 18). 

Finally, as 1 have argued, the construct of belief often rests on an 
individual's recognition of her lack of personal certainty or a lack of social 
consensus. Ambivalence is a significant characteristic of this construct, 
belief; as such it may be inferred from people's discussions of their sense of 
the possibility or uncertainty with which they assess various phenomena or 
ideas. Ambivalence is an outcome of experience, of noticing evidence, of 
living in a social environment. Ambivalence is not part of a fixed sequence in 
an individual's life. The recognition that ambivalence is an integral 
component of belief may help us understand why speakers of American 
English do not use the category of belief as a synonym for that of knowledge. 

University of California at Los Angeles 

Notes 

1. I read a slightly shorter version of this paper at the American Folklore Society 
 Meeting in Philadelphia, October 21, 1989. 

2. Quoted with permission. 

3. I want to acknowledge the contribution Prof. Michael Owen Jones has had on 
 my thinking and writing about the issues discussed in this paper. 

4. My data and analysis derive from my dissertation research with elementary 
 school-age children, Topanga, California, 1985-1986. All names are pseudo 
 nyms. 

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Santa Claus 

5. See, for example, Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual (Chicago: Aldine, 1967) 
 179, who equates ambivalence with the decline of belief. 

6. Stories about Bloody Mary--also known as Bloody Murder, Mary Whales and Mary 
Worth--are widely reported. See, for example, Jan Harold Brunvand, The Mexican 
Pet: More "New" Urban Legends and Some Old Favorites (New York: W. W. Norton 
and Co., 1986) 81; Simon Bronner, ed., American Children's Folklore (Little Rock: 
August House, 1988) 168-169; Bengt af Klintberg, "Black Madame, Come Out!" 
Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore 44 (1988): 155-167; Mary Knapp and Herbert 
Knapp One Potato. Two Potato: The Secret Education of American Children (New 
York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1976) 241-242; and Janet Langlois, '''Mary Whales, I 
Believe in You, '" Indiana Folklore: A Reader, ed. Linda Degh (Bloomington: Indiana 
University Press, 1980) 196-224. 

Works Cited 

Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. 1954. Garden City: Doubleday 
 Anchor Books, 1958. 

Anderson, Carl John. "On Discovering the Truth: Children's Reaction to the Reality 
 of the Santa Claus Myth." Diss. University of Texas, Austin, 1987. 

Barnes, S. B. "Paradigms--Scientific and Social." Man: The Journal of the Royal 
 Anthropological Institute 4 (1969): 94-102. 

Bern, Daryl J. Beliefs. Attitudes. and Human Affairs. Belmont: Brooks Cole 
 Publishing Co, 1970. 

Black, Mary B. "Belief Systems." Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology. 
 Ed. J. J. Honigmann. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973. 509-577. 

Blair, John R., Judy S. McKee and Louise F. Jernigan. "Children's Belief in Santa 
Claus, Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy. Psychological Reports 46 (1980): 691-
694. 

Bronner, Simon, ed. American Children's Folklore. Little Rock: August House, 
 1988. 

Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Mexican Pet: More "New" Urban Legends and Some 
 Old Favorites. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1986. 

Dandridge, Thomas C. "The Life Stages of a Symbol: When Symbols Work and 
When They Can't." Organizational Culture. Ed. Peter 1. Frost, Larry F. Moore, 
Meryl Reis Louis, Craig C. Lundberg and Joanne Martin. Beverly Hills: Sage 
Publications, 1985. 141-153. 

Georges, Robert A. "The General Concept of Legend: Some Assumptions to be 
Reexamined and Reassessed." American Folk Legend: A Symposium. Ed. 
Wayland D. Hand. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. 1-19. 

Goffman, Erving. Interaction Ritual. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, Company, 1967. 

Haut, Judith Ellen. Children's Belief: A Folkloristic Study of Conceptualization. 
Experimentation and Communication. Diss. University of California, Los 
Angeles, 1989. Ann Arbor: UMI8918029. 

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Haut 

Jones, Michael Owen. "Superstition: The Virtuous Weed." Paper read at the 
 California Folklore Society Meeting. Dominguez Hills, California, 1973. 

Klintberg, Bengt af. "Black Madame, Come Out!" Scandinavian Yearbook of 
 Folklore 44 (1988): 155-167. 

Knapp, Mary and Herbert Knapp. One Potato. Two Potato: The Secret Education 
 of American Children. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1976. 

 Langlois, Janet. "Mary Whales, I Believe in You." Indiana Folklore: A Reader. 
 Ed. Linda Dégh. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. 196-224. (First 
 published Indiana Folklore, 11 (1978): 5-33.) 

Opie, Peter and Iona Opie. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. 1959. 
 Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967. 

Prentice, Norman M., Martin Manosevitz and Laura Hubbs. "Imaginery Figures of 
Early Childhood: Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy." American 
Journal of Orthopsychiatty 48 (1978): 618-628. 

Quine, W. V. and Ullian, J. S. The Web of Belief. New York: Random House, 
 Inc., 1970. 

Saler, Benson. "Beliefs, Disbeliefs and Unbeliefs." Anthropological Ouarterly 
 41(1968): 29-33. 

Thome, Will. "Smart Santa: Researcher Studies Beliefs on the Job." Santa Monica 
 Evening Outlook 5 Dec. 1986: A-4. 

Toelken, Barre. "The Performative Aspect of Northwest Superstition." Northwest 
 Folklore 4 (1985): 13-22. 

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The Tooth Fairy: Perspectives on Money and Magic  
Tad Tuleja 

As an embodiment of magical munificence, the tooth fairy 
is second only to Santa Claus in the folklore of American 

childhood. Juvenile belief in the figure is as widespread 
and durable as belief in old Saint Nick, and the iconic elements 
of the accompanying ritual-the pillow, the unseen visitor, the 
transformation of the tooth into money-are as stereotyped in 
popular culture as the stocking by the chimney or carrots for 
the reindeer. So firmly does the tooth fairy dominate juvenile 
fantasy life, in fact, that discovering the "truth" about this 
shadowy benefactor constitutes a major negation rite in the 
prepubertal passage out of innocence: to say that someone "still 
believes in the tooth fairy" defines him as quaintly naive. 

But while Santa Claus does not want for scholarly 
attention, the tooth fairy has been largely neglected. Psy-
chologists (Blair et al., Prentice et al., and Scheibe and Condry) 
have provided useful data on her place in children's cognitive 
development. Rosemary Wells of the Northwestern University 
dental school has investigated popular representations and 
conducted a pioneering survey on custom details (1981). 
"Ethnodentist" William Carter and his colleagues have 
produced an extremely useful catalogue of dental folklore. The 
contributions of folklorists, however, have been scant. Leo 
Kanner's classic monograph does not mention the custom at all, 
and later American researchers do so only in passing. Even 
though American archives find elements of the custom dating 
from early in this century, no concentrated attempt has yet been 
made to trace the figure's genealogy, explain how she grew 
from folk belief to national custom, or analyze her 
contemporary functional significance. I will address those three 
issues here. 

I: An Uncertain Genealogy 

Relying on Katharine Briggs's standard work, Rosemary 
Wells concludes, by weight of omission, that the dental sprite 
is "America's only fairy"-a creature "never referred to in 
European literature," and equally absent from Old World 
folkore (1981). True enough if you are looking for her by 
name. Seek a "tooth fairy" in European indexes of folklore 
motifs and you will come away disappointed. Nor are 
contemporary European children-with the odd exception in 

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Tuleja 

Americanized Britain-familiar with the figure or the ritual. Wells is 
certainly right. The stylized ritual of pillow-tooth-and-money is not only 
American, but of recent vintage; the archives support her reasonable guess of 
about 1900 as a starting point (1981). 

But even though the spoor is faint, European precursors, if not proto-
types, do exist. I have been no more successful than Dr. Wells in identifying 
a clear line of descent, but I have found European customs which suggest the 
tooth fairy ritual. Let me discuss a few of them briefly in an order of 
ascending probability. 

A. The tooth coin as an example of "fairv gold." Among the commonly  
cited attributes of English and Irish fairies are their affluence and ac-
companying generosity: the pot at the end of the leprechauns' rainbow and 
the fairies' double payment of a debt to humans suggest a broad tradition of 
philanthropic pixies. With this tradition in mind, Jacqueline Simpson 
suggests that the tooth fairy exchange may derive from an old British custom 
of rewarding industrious servant girls with "fairy" coins, left surreptitiously 
in their shoes as they slept (1973). 

The structural similarities are clear enough--domestic hygiene is 
rewarded by a mater familias acting on behalf of a phantom donor--but one 
critical element, the lost tooth, is conspicuously absent. In addition, the line 
of descent from shoe to pillow is inconveniently broken since the tooth fairy 
doesn't reach England until the 1960s. This first candidate thus seems more 
parallel than precursor. 

B. The tooth as placation or self-defense. Both Irish and British folk 
traditions are rich in doleful stories of fairy changelings: healthy infants who 
are exchanged in their cradles for sickly, inconsolable pixie clones. Although 
it may seem churlish to suggest so, there are structural links between the 
tooth fairy ritual and folk practices designed to foil such kidnappers. 

Since teeth have long symbolized imperishability, they function 
worldwide as talismans against evil. Might not the tooth of an innocent child, 
set near it as it sleeps, be seen both as a kind of "guard-all" and, more 
complexly, as a surrogate sacrifice--a pars pro toto consolation for spirits 
who seek to snatch the child itself? 

This notion, whimsical, as it may seem, is lent credence by two 
peculiarities of the tooth fairy ritual. One appears in the most common 
variant of the custom, in which the tooth, instead of being placed beneath the 
pillow, is set near the bed, in a glass or on a plate, after having been sprinkled 
with salt. As Ernest Jones's classic monograph pointed out fifty years ago, 
salt-probably because of its "magical" preservative properties-has since 
antiquity symbolized purity, protection, and eternal life. One need not accept 
Jones's Freudian conclusion to appreciate the significance of salt as a shield 
from evil, and indeed it is specifically mentioned by 

14 



 

Tooth Fairy 

the Radfords and by Vance Randolph as a bane against malevolent pixies. 
The second peculiarity is that other typical pixie banes also suggest the 

pillowed tooth. Iron has been used for centuries as a means of protection 
against evil--both in its familiar horseshoe shape and in the form of a cross or 
a knife. To guard sleeping children against evil fairies, one source suggests a 
knife under the pillow--and no less an authority than Katherine Briggs makes 
the link to the tooth fairy explicit when she cites a knife held in the mouth! 
(1981). 

Furthermore, surrogate offerings have been made to water spirits 
throughout northern Europe and the British Isles, and between at least one 
water spirit and the tooth fairy there is a linguistically suggestive missing 
link. I mean Lancashire's most famous "nursery bogey," the "cannibal witch," 
Jenny Greenteeth. 

Typically, this demon lurks in stagnant ponds, awaiting the arrival of 
careless children, but in spite of --or perhaps because of--her gruesome 
nature, she is also sometimes enlisted as a way of eliciting obedience ("Go to 
sleep now or Jenny Greenteeth will get you") and as a kind of free floating 
dental assistant. She serves this latter function because the pond scum known 
as Lesser Duckweed (Lemna minor) is thought to resemble green teeth 
(Simpson and Vickery). As Rosemary Wells has pointed out, modem dentists 
enlist the tooth fairy for the same hygienic purpose, and in some families the 
going rate for a baby tooth is reduced for each cavity the tooth contains 
(Muro). 

C. The Italian "tooth fairy": Marantega. Throughout most of Italy, the 
Christmas season benefactor, corresponding to northern Europe's Saint 
Nicholas, goes by the name of Befana. Gaunt and toothless, she resembles 
the stock crone figure of popular legends, yet unlike other witches, she can 
be kindly to children: it is Befana, the Old One (La Vecchia or La Stregha) 
who dispenses presents to the deserving at Epiphany. 

The Venetian version of this witch is Marantega, and Marantega 
displays generosity not only at the Christmas season, but also when children 
lose teeth (Riegler 1920). A shed tooth is placed under the child's bed or 
under its pillow, and in the night Marantega--thinking, perhaps, of her own 
toothlessness--exchanges it for a coin. Again, the lines of descent here are 
faint, and admittedly the American archives hardly hint at an Italian 
connection. I mention the Venetian figure, even as a dark horse candidate, 
because the similarity of detail is so remarkable. There is also a possible 
linguistic link in that occasionally tooth fairy citations name a "witch" rather 
than the more conventional fairy. 

D. French connections. Similarly isolated, and similarly provocative, 
parallels appear in French archival material. Recall that Wells has traced the 
American custom to about the turn of this century; at least two Gallic tooth 
rituals are roughly contemporary. The first, from 1887, has the child 

15 



 

Tuleja 

put the tooth beneath its pillow, and the exchange for money or a toy being 
accomplished by no less a figure than the Virgin Mary (Daleau). The 
second, from 1902, has a "good fairy" as the benevolent dental agent, with 
the reward being not money but candy (Carter et al.). 

Chronology favors these French connections, but again the genealogy 
is hazy. In contemporary French ritual, moreover, it is a mouse, not a fairy, 
who takes the tooth: in a recent dictionary of French superstitions, the fairy 
agent is relegated--one might say banished--to uncivilized "Anglo-Saxon" 
countries (Lasne and Gaultier). And, although French Canadian children do 
offer their teeth to a fée (Des Ruisseaux), it is unclear whether she reached 
Quebec by way of New York or Le Havre. 

E. The tooth fairy and the "tooth mouse". Finally, the folklore figure 
whom I consider, in spite of surface dissimilarities, to be the best candidate 
for the title of Urfee: the ubiquitous European "tooth mouse." 

Shed teeth are offered to animals in virtually every region of Europe, 
with the commonest recipients of the teeth being crows, birds in general, and 
rodents. In the most widespread version of the custom, the child places the 
tooth in a mouse hole, or behind furniture, or near the hearth or oven; and, 
with a doggeral formula, asks the mouse to exchange the lost tooth for a 
better one. 

Disciples of Max Muller in the 1920s saw this ritual as a survival of 
offerings to fire gods. They linked the mouse, quite ingeniously, to the sun, 
and thus explained at one stroke the three commonest methods of tooth 
disposal: whether the child hurled the tooth into the air, threw it into the fire, 
or offered it to a mouse, the common element was sun worship (Lindsay). In 
more recent psychoanalytical interpretations, the mouse becomes a phallic 
symbol, the surrender ritual an act of compensation, both mirroring and 
dramatically resolving the Oedipal fantasy (Lewis and Russell). 

As charmingly provocative as such readings may be, I would suggest, 
pace Occam, that the obvious utility of the mouse is homeopathic. Whatever 
they may signify metaphorically, mice in fact are small rodents with great 
incisors and the good sense to nest in warm, dark places. One surrenders milk 
teeth to these rodents in the hopes of getting better, that is rodentlike, teeth in 
return. The logic is preserved, though inverted, in the companion belief that 
you should never leave your fallen teeth where a dog, or a pig, might come 
upon them--unless you want dogs' or pigs' teeth in return. 

At first glance, the candidacy of the tooth mouse seems less solid than 
that of Jenny Greenteeth, the Virgin Mary or Marantega. But for three reasons 
I prefer this to the others. First, the range of the custom. The shilling in the 
shoe, Jenny Greenteeth, Marantega, even the French Virgin--all appear 
locally, isolated. The tooth mouse, on the other hand, ranges from 

16 



 

Tooth Fairy 

the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and also makes frequent appearances in both 
Americas (Svanberg and Rooth). The sheer body of evidence allows for 
numerous intersections--on both sides of the Atlantic--where the mouse 
could have, in effect, sprouted wings. 

Second, there are hints in exchange formulas that hard molars and hard 
cash can be confused. In most formulas, the child asks the mouse for a 
"better" tooth, and sometimes for a "tooth of iron." Occasionally, however, 
he demands a more valuable tooth--one made of silver or gold (Svanberg and 
Rooth). From iron tooth to gold tooth to gold itself does require only a 
modest leap of logic. 

Third, not only is there evidence, as we have seen, of the switch from 
mouse to fairy in 19th century France, but there is also what Carter lucidly 
calls a "credible mechanism" for explaining the shift That mechanism, 
identified in Francois Loux's fascinating L' Oare et la Dent, is a popular fairy 
tale, "La Bonne Petite Souris," written by Madame D'Aulnoy at the close of 
the 18th century. In this tale, a nameless "good queen," imprisoned by a 
nameless "bad king," befriends a mouse which is impressed with her 
kindness. The creature turns out to be a fairy, and she not only frees the 
queen from her imprisonment, but also knocks out the wicked king's teeth, 
hides under his pillow to torment him, and eventually has him assassinated 
by his palace guard. A 1928 translation of the D'Aulnoy story depicts the 
fairy quite explicitly as a smiling rodent--with wings! 

Does this prove that the tooth fairy was once a mouse? No. But, with 
range, chronology, and that "credible mechanism" on its side, it's the best 
candidate I have found. It's interesting to note that three modern childrens' 
authors seem to agree. A 1976 "history" of the tooth fairy uses the same 
mouse-to-fairy format as D'Aulnoy; in Lucy Bate's popular Little Rabbit's 
Loose Tooth, the fairy is a rabbit with wings; and in Stephen Kroll's Loose 
Tooth, the children and the fairy (that is, their parents) are bats. Perhaps the 
collective authorial consciousness is finally picking up on D'Aulnoy's insight 

II. From Folk Belief to National Custom 

The tooth fairy makes isolated appearances in the United States as early 
as the turn of this century, but she only becomes nationally established after 
the Second World War. The term "tooth fairy" is first indexed in popular 
literature in 1949, when a Lee Rogow story by that title appeared in Collier's 
magazine. Rosemary Wells takes this as evidence that the custom was 
"ingrained" by that time; given the sparseness of citations from before the 
war, it's as likely that the story spurred, not just registered, a developing 
tradition. In both North America and Great Britain, "ingraining" only really 
happens in the 1960s; the best evidence for this is Wells's own observation 

17 



 

Tuleja 

that the first encyclopedia mention of the custom was Alan Dundes's 1979 
article in World Book. 

But why the 1950s? Why this sudden spurt to prominence of a long-
practiced but obscure folk tradition? Or, to phrase it as a query about genre: 
What transforms the tooth fairy, around midcentury, from a relatively obscure 
folk belief into a national custom? Let me suggest three factors. 

1. Postwar affluence. In my informal "field research" for this paper, I 
asked my father-in-law, who grew up in rural Arkansas in the 1920s and 
1930s, whether his family had practiced the tooth fairy custom. "We were too 
poor," he told me. "Nickles were hard to come by. You certainly wouldn't 
waste one on a tooth." 

It's a telling comment, and I think representative. Jacqueline Simpson has 
suggested that before the 1960s in Great Britain, wealthy households probably 
knew the custom, but poorer ones could not afford to (Hand). That is a useful 
speculation about America too. It seems likely that the greater availability of 
discretionary income during the postwar boom may have contributed to the 
spread of the custom. 

2. The Cult of the Child. Childhood, as Philippe Aries and others have 
reminded us, is a relatively recent invention, and the notion of catering to 
one's child is recenter still. That notion enjoyed a heyday in the years just 
following World War II, when James Dean was canonized for being 
misunderstood, and all "good" parents knew (because Dr. Spock told them so) 
that their proper role was to serve their children's needs, among them the need 
to fantasize and to feel loved. The dominance of this new, child centered view 
of the family certainly made the 1950s fertile ground for what Wells calls "a 
symbolic ritual of replacement, born in sympathy, propelled in love and 
sustained in warmth and care" (Dent). 

3. Media encouragement.  In an instructive survey of European fairy 
traces in the New World, Wayland Hand calls publication an increasingly 
significant factor in the consolidation of folk traditions in modem times. The 
history of the Grimm brothers' tales, riot to mention the dime novelists' Pecos 
Bill or the Santa created by Clement Moore and Thomas Nast, bear out his 
observation. With regard to the tooth fairy, it may also be underlined by 
Madame D'Aulnoy's tale and, in the 1950s, by Lee Rogow's short story in 
Collier's. 

More significant than these print examples, however, is the example of 
the movies. I do not think it is merely coincidental that the decade immedi-
ately preceding the proliferation of the tooth fairy custom saw the release of 
four feature mms in which female pixies play a central role. In 1939, 
American children saw Billie Barnes, as a shimmering Glinda, the Good 
Witch of the North, teach Judy Garland the true meaning of home. A year 
later, in the Disney version of Carlo Collodi's tale, the "Blue Fairy" taught 
Pinocchio about truth. In 1950, Disney's Cinderella was rewarded for her 

18 



 

Tooth Fairy 

selflessness by a "fairy godmother" who, like, D'Aulnoy's character, works 
magic with mice. And in 1953, the most pixielike of all our fairies, Tinker 
Bell, was saved from death by the eternal boy, Peter Pan. All of these films 
reached massive audiences. It does not stretch logic too far, I think, to 
suggest that their influence may have helped prepare the ground-in concert 
with Dr. Spock and the gross national product-for the "nationalizing" of the 
custom (Carter et a1.). 

III. From Magic to Money 

Functional analyses of the tooth fairy custom, up to now, have been 
provided only by developmental psychologists, interested in the meaning for 
the individual child of this quintessentially domestic ritual. The tooth 
exchange has been seen, as a consequence, as a psychodrama of fantasy 
management or of condolence (Blair et al., Prentice et al., Scheibe and 
Condry, and Wells 1981). To my knowledge no one has explained the social 
utility of the ritual, or noted how with precise theatricality it validates 
specific economic behavior. 

That the ritual "models" economic behavior, however, is clear from the 
psychological evidence. Clinical students of the custom agree that it is 
supervising parents, not peers, who introduce the belief to young children 
(Balir et a1. and Prentice et a1.). The tooth fairy is an adult creation. Given 
the "lesson" of the ritual, this is not surprising. For the economic message of 
the custom is an adult and modem one: "Produce and Sell." This message 
may be contrasted to the infantile (one might say "primitive") message 
"Produce and Hoard." 

In a primitive, which is to say pre-exchange economy, one may 
legitimately expect reward for production, and for accumulation of product. 
We see this static economics in ancient Scandinavia, where children were 
rewarded when they cut a tooth. The Nordic "tooth fee" functions appropri-
ately in a hoarding economy, where the mere possession of goods is a sign of 
value. 

The market system, on the other hand, cannot function without the 
continual surrender of hoarded goods: free exchange is its lifeblood. And in 
such an economy the pithy quaintness of a "tooth for a tooth," even if it's iron 
(or gold) for bone, must give way ultimately to cash payment. That is the 
logic of both monetization and the free market, and it is the social lesson that 
parents teach (albeit unconsciously) when they direct their charges to place 
their teeth under the pillow. 

Moreover, the tooth fairy custom, like any other free-market ritual, is 
constantly affected by broad market forces. Nothing so clearly shows how the 
ritual models behavior than the fact of tooth exchange inflation. Between 
1900 and 1975, Rosemary Wells has found, the "going rate" for a lost 

19 



 

Tuleja 

tooth rose from 12 to 85 cents (Wells 1983). Granted, that's still a rela- 
tively modest sum, but if the ritual were as innocent as is commonly 
supposed--if it were merely a vestige of sacrifice or an enactment of parental 
concern--then a nominal price would point the lesson quite as well. That the 
fairy's bill consistently rises along with the consumer price index suggests an 
integration of the custom into domestic economy that belies its common 
presentation as a "caring" game. 

Or rather, it is a caring game-managed by parents who understand the 
importance, in a market economy, that their kids know the value of a buck. 
Wells has it right: The exchange ritual, she admits, has a "mercenary aura." It 
reflects a "reassuring image of good capitalist values" (Muro 45) 

Thus magic itself-whose essence is transformation-is itself transformed. 
We move from an image of the generic "good" fairy, turning bone teeth into 
nominal nickles, toward an image of the "tooth" fairy (now a specialist), 
predictably exchanging molars at the market rate. With the encouragement of 
mortgage-carrying parents, children now grow more than mere teeth: they 
"grow" the system by putting their products on the market 

The process of market cooption has long been understood with regard to 
everybody's sugar daddy, the American Santa. The tooth fairy holds a shorter 
and less visible pedigree than that saint of the second fiscal quarter, but her 
economic function, in today's society, differs only in degree. In a sense, I 
suppose, she may even be seen as more rationalized, less personal, than the 
Christmas sprite. Santa, after all, still brings presents, while the tooth fairy 
translates everything into cash. The message of Santa Claus may be seen as a 
relatively humanized one: "being good" will get you Barbies or a Rambo 
doll. The tooth fairy's message is more direct: anything-even your own body-
can, if you work it right, be turned to gold. That, in its final, reductive 
wisdom, is precisely the necessary magic of free enterprise. 

University of Massachusetts at Amherst 

A revised and enlarged version of this conference paper appear in Peter Narvaez, 
ed., The Good People: New Fairylore Essays, forthcoming from Garland Press. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bate, Lucy. Little Rabbit's Loose Tooth. New York: Crown, 1975. 

Blair, John, J. S. McKee and L. F. Jernigan. "Children's Belief in Santa Claus, 
Easter Bunny, and Tooth Fairy." Psychological Reports 46 (1980): 691-94. 

Briggs, Katherine. "Some Unpleasant Characters among British Fairies." Venetia 
Newall, ed. Folklore Studies in the Twentieth Century. Woodbridge, Suffolk: 
Brewer, 1980: 143-46. 

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Tooth Fairy 

Briggs, Katharine. An Encyclopedia of Fairies. New York: Pantheon, 1981. 

Carter, William et. al. Ethnodentisuy and Dental Folklore. Overland Park, Kansas: 
Dental Folklore Books of Kansas City, 1987. 

Daleau, Francois. Notes Pour servir l'etude des traditions, croyances, et supersti 
 tions de 1a Gironde. Bordeaux: A. Bellier, 1889. 

D'Aulnoy, Mme.1a Contesse. The White Cat and Other Old French Fairy 
 Tales. M. Planche, trans. New York: Macmillan, 1928. 

Dent, Penelope. "In Search of the Elusive Tooth Fairy." Woman's Day 16 
 December 1981. 

Des Ruisseaux, Pierre. Croyances et pratiques Populaires au Canada francais. 
 Montreal: Editions du Jour, 1973. 

Dundes, Alan. "Fairy." World Book Encyclopedia, 7 (1979): 12. 

Granger, Byrd H. "Of the Teeth." Journal of American Folklore 74 (1961): 47-56. 

Hand, Wayland D. "European Fairy Lore in the New World." Folklore 92.2 (1981): 
141-48. 

Jones, Ernest. (1923). "The Symbolic Significance of Salt in Folklore and 
Superstition." Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis. 2 (New York: International 
Universities, 1951): 22-109. 

Kanner, Leo. Folklore of the Teeth. New York: Macmillan, 1928. 

Kroll, Steven. Loose Tooth. New York: Holiday, 1984. 
Lasne, Sophie and Andre Gaultier. A Dictionary of Superstitions. Amy Reynolds, 
 trans. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984. 

Lewis, Harvey. "The Effect of Shedding the First Deciduous Tooth upon the 
 Passing of the Oedipus Complex of the Male." Journal of the American Psy 
 choanalytical Association 6.1 (1958): 5-37. 

Lindsay, Lillian. 'The Sun, the Saint, and the Toothdrawer." British Dental Journal 
 5 (1933): 453-65. 

Lindsay, Lillian. "Influence of the Sun on the Teeth." Journal of the American 
 Dental Association 21 (1934): 616-22. 

Loux, Francois. L'ogre et la dent. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1981. 

McAllister, Fran, and Frank McAllister. The Tooth Fairy Legend. Dallas: Taylor, 
1976. 

Muro, Mark. "They Believe in the Tooth Fairy." Boston Globe 15 July 1981. 45 
 46. 

Prentice, Norman, Martin Manosevitz, and Laura Hubbs. "Imaginary Figures of Early 
Childhood: Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy." American 
Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 48.4 (1978): 618-28. 

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Tuleja 
Radford, Edwin, and Mona Radford. Encvclopedia of Superstitions. New York: 
 Philosophical Library, 1949. 

Randolph, Vance. Ozark Superstitions. New York: Columbia, 1947. 

Riegler, Richard. "Venezianische 'Marantega' und Verwandtes." Archivum 
Romanicum 4.4 (1920): 490-92. 

Riegler, Richard. "Zahnwechsel und Mythus." Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 
 23 (1923/24): 162-63. 

Rogow, Lee. "The Tooth Fairy." Colliers 124 (1949): 26. 

Rooth, Anna. Offering of the First Tooth. Uppsala: Ethnological Institute, 1982. 

Russell, Claire. "A Study in the Folk Symbolism of Kinship: the Tooth Image." 
Venetia Newall, ed. Folklore Studies in the Twentieth Century. Woodbridge, 
Suffolk: Brewer, 1980. 365-370. 

Scheibe, Cyndy, and John Condry. "Developmental Differences in Children's 
Reasoning about Santa Claus and Other Fantasy Characters." Paper presented 
to the Biennial Conference of the Society for Research in Child Development, 
Baltimore, 23-27 April 1987. 

Simpson, Jacqueline. The Folklore of Sussex. London: Batsford, 1973. 

Simpson, Jacqueline. Eurovean Mvthologv. New York: Peter Bedrick, 1987. 

Svanberg, Ingvar. 1987. "The Folklore of Teeth Among Turkic and Adjacent 
 Peoples." Central Asiatic Journal 321.1 and 2 (1987): 111- 37. 

Tanner, Jeri. "The Teeth in Folklore." Western Folklore 27.2 (1968): 97-105. 

Vickery, Roy. "Lemna minor and Jenny Greenteeth." Folklore 94.2 (1983): 247 
 50. 

Wells, Rosemary. The Tooth Fairv. Ed. Susan Bohn. Stevens Point, WI: private 
 printing, 1980. 

Wells, Rosemary. "Tracking the Tooth Fairy." ca146.12 (1983) 1-8, 47.1 (1983): 
 18-25, and 47.2 (1983): 25-31. 

22 



 

Show Biz: Performance and Text in the Children's Show 
Elizabeth Wein 

When contemplating the play of my childhood in terms of 
performance, one specific play frame comes to mind over and 
over again: the "show." A "show" was what my siblings, 
cousins and friends called any kind of planned display of our 
play, where parents and other friends were called together and 
asked to pay attention to what we were doing. The key word is 
"planned"; shows were not necessarily rehearsed, but they were 
always discussed ahead of time. Sometimes a program would 
be written, either for us to follow informally, or to be formally 
distributed to the audience. Indeed, a "show" was directly 
intended to be a performance, with a designated audience and 
specific keys to indicate where the performance began and 
ended. A pattern does seem to emerge in the development of 
these "shows" in my own life; over the years they grow more 
oriented towards a written text and less towards play. The 
performance becomes less fluid, more rehearsed, more rigid, 
more like "a play" than "play." Of course, if one looked for it 
enthusiastically enough, any pattern might emerge. It would be 
interesting if a truly empirical study were to be carried out 
concerning the development of children's "shows" other than 
my own. 

In order to most effectively communicate the transition 
from a performance-oriented show to a text-oriented show, it 
would be best if I defined some of these terms as I understand 
and use them. My notion of "text" stems from the literary 
theory of Roland Barthes. Barthes submits that while "the work 
can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists 
in the movement of a discourse" (157). ''Text'' does not exist on 
paper, though that is where it is recorded; rather, it exists as a 
thing in itself, separate and immutable regardless of typeface or 
individual interpretation. My concept of performance and how 
it relates to text is based on Richard Bauman's suggestion that 
"performance represents a transformation of the basic 
referential uses of language"; the suggestion that 

performance sets up, or represents, an interpretative frame 
within which the messages being communicated are to be 
understood, and that this frame contrasts with at least one 
other frame, the literal. (9) 

"Performance" I take to mean any interpretation of the 

23 



 

Wein 

unchangeable, luminous text. Thus every performance of Hamlet is a unique 
interpretation of the actual text; any reading of Hamlet, even if it is read over 
again by the same person, is also a unique interpretation of that text. More to 
the point, a performance of the last chapters of The Lord of the Rings (one of 
the later shows performed by me and my cousins) is a unique interpretation of 
that particular text. In the Platonic sense, the performance is the shadow of 
the real text, and the real text of a work of written literature can never 
actually be approached. Ideally, however, text and performance should be one 
and the same: unique, not interpretative but complete and irrecoverable. 
Barthes claims that "the Text is experienced only in an activity of production" 
(157; ital. Barthes); performance is just such a production, and the synthesis 
of text and performance can be achieved in the young child's "show." 

The earliest version of the show that I can reconstruct from my own 
childhood is a performance of "Little Red Riding Hood," when I was four 
years old. The story was acted out in our living room; there were simple 
costumes and basic props. My father was acting the part of the wolf, and I 
was Little Red Riding Hood. There was no rehearsal or preparation; both I 
and my father knew the story and the expected text, and we were going to 
perform for an audience that consisted only of my mother and two year old 
brother, who knew the story also. 

My father and I often acted out stories. The reason this particular 
occasion was memorable is that it was a conscious attempt at performance. 
My father and I enacted stories and poems that I knew; I can remember 
waiting under a lilac arbor in trepidation, "sword" in hand, while my father 
came "whiffling through the tulgey wood" towards me in the person of the 
Jabberwock. I "feared" the approach of the "monster" my father enacted; we 
had no audience except each other. I became the character I was playing. In 
our performance of "Little Red Riding Hood" I was acting out a prescribed 
character whose feelings did not overlap with mine, and there was a 
designated audience. I was not afraid of the wolf, as I had been of the 
Jabberwock, but I was "afraid" of the audience. Because of the presence of an 
audience, no matter how informal, my attitude towards the performance 
changed, and this in turn changed the text. When the "wolf' questioned, 
"What's your name, little girl?" I began squirming self-consciously and 
answered not "Little Red Riding Hood" but "Poofy Snooze." I do not re-
member if the exercise in performance had been intended as an object lesson 
("don't talk to strangers") or merely as an experience in drama, but the effect 
of my answer was to channel the performance toward humor. We started the 
show seriously enough, but after the heroine introduced herself the rest of the 
play became comedy and parody. Our performance of "Little Red Riding 
Hood"--or "Poofy Snooze"--is an example of text and performance as a 
unique, integrated existence, completed on a single evening 

24 



 

Show Biz 

in 1969, and unrepeatable. 
Another example of a scripted performance that went awry occurred 

when I was seven. In this case, a group of friends and I decided to put on a 
show that was based on a story I was writing at the time. My four year old 
younger brother, Jared, was cast as the younger brother of a character in the 
story. At a critical moment I was supposed to inform him that his "sister" had 
been kidnapped. We rehearsed this several times, and Jared was fairly bored 
with the scenario by the time we presented it to an audience-a group of about 
ten neighborhood children. When I told Jared, "Your sister's gone!" he said 
disgustedly, pointing offstage to where his "sister" was hiding, "So what? 
She's over there." Because of this departure from the script we had to 
improvise the rest of our carefully rehearsed production. For different 
reasons, Jared did exactly the same thing to the performance that I had done 
in "Little Red Riding Hood" when I was his age. He changed the performance 
by changing the text, and created a performance free of any text except its 
own. 

All my shows were in some sense oriented towards a script, as these first 
two examples indicate. If there were no younger players to find the script 
unnecessary or uninteresting, there might not be as many players as the script 
called for. On one occasion, when I was seven, a friend and I decided we 
would perform scenes from one of my favorite books as entertainment for my 
mother. At first we performed theatrically, with my mother seated in front of 
a "set"; my friend and I wore costumes and acted behind an imaginary line 
which separated the two of us "on stage" from my mother "in the audience." 
However, for our second scene we had to enlist my mother as a third 
character, causing her to cross that boundary; and by the third scene we no 
longer thought of ourselves as putting on a show, but were playing in earnest. 
By this time my mother was in the kitchen washing dishes; when the occasion 
called for an extra character we involved her, but for the most part we 
continued to act out the story without an audience. In this instance play and 
performance mixed effortlessly, and became one and the same. There was no 
dependence on the audience; the quality and significance of our performance 
remained unchanged whether or not my mother was watching. 

In my first two examples the text was created by the context of the 
performance. The third example used text to shape the performance, but here 
text was secondary to the mechanisms of performance and play. At this point 
the "script" began to occupy an increasingly significant position in my shows. 
Traditionally, every time my siblings and I were together with our cousins we 
put on a show; originally, these were in the form of pageants or tableau-like 
Nativity scenes, but as time went on the shows grew more elaborate. Costume 
was always important; rehearsal was secondary, but there was at least a 
specific plan to be followed. I did most 

25 



 

Wein 

of the planning; I was the oldest of the cousins, and after my brother was 
injured in a car accident there was a five year gap in age between me and 
the next in age. In the later shows I did not actually participate as an actor, 
and wrote plans for plays which contained sections of script that were more 
or less followed word for word. Our most memorable performance was a 
production of some of the final scenes in The Lord of the Rings; this was 
memorable mostly because of elaborate costumes and a carefully constructed 
volcano that actually glowed with a baleful red light (effected by a flashlight 
shining through red cloth). There was no written script for this production; 
the youngest performer was seven years old, and the oldest eleven. The 
children knew what to do in each scene, and followed general guidelines; but 
the final text was created before the adult audience as the show was 
performed. "The Abduction" was a three-minute silent film of the same 
vintage as our production of The Lord of the Rings, and it was created in 
exactly the same way. I planned it, my cousins rehearsed it once, and we 
filmed it. Silent film would have been ideally suited to any of our shows at 
this time, for they were governed by rigorous rules as far as costume and 
action were concerned, but were then still flexible in terms of text. 

The last show performed by my cousins and me was produced when I 
was seventeen. It was called "A Midsummer Day's Eve's Dream." The plot 
had nothing to do with the Shakespeare play of similar title; but it did follow 
an actual script, and was based on a specific poem by Eleanor Farjeon. I had 
by this time formed my own sense of what Bauman explains to be Goffman's 
"keys" to performance (16); "A Midsummer Day's Eve's Dream" had a 
narrator's introduction and a closing disclaimer plagiarised straight from 
Shakespeare. Also, text and performance were becoming for me the two 
separate entities that I now see them as being. The text of "A Midsummer 
Day's Eve's Dream" exists in its own right, pastiche of Shakespeare and 
children's poems though it is. It could be performed again, using the same 
text, although the original performance could not be reproduced. At about the 
same time that this show was produced, a friend and I videotaped a play my 
friend had written called ''The Tragedy of the Thane of Cawdor." Like "The 
Abduction," it was rehearsed only once before being recorded. Unlike ''The 
Abduction," "The Tragedy of the Thane of Cawdor" included sound; it also 
relied heavily on scripts. The final performance, the one that is recorded for 
posterity, shows all the characters with scripts in hand-sheaves of white 
typing paper, which are especially evident in the case of one near-sighted 
actor who had to hold his manuscript two inches from his face in order to be 
able to read. 

What caused this shift in emphasis from performance to the written 
word? Part of it is inevitable in our culture, and stems from the notion that 
anything on paper is privileged over anything communicated orally (even 

26 



 

Show Biz 

the television reporters shuffle sheaves of paper before them on their desks; 
we trust they are not making up their information). Part of the shift also has 
to do with Rivka R. Eifermann's notion of "mastering performance" (141). 
Although she speaks of a solitary act in her childhood as performance and I 
speak of performances that were most often designed with an audience in 
mind, our experiences are similar in that we were both "performing crea-
tively" as well as playing. By shifting from improvisation and free play to a 
designated script the child can prove his mastery of language, his memori-
zation ability, his acting ability. And in this society, acting from a designated 
script is a more valid and more widely recognized mode of performance than 
improvisation. What separates the games and unplanned "shows" of 
childhood from the games and studied theater of adulthood is fundamentally 
the same thing that separates oral from written literature. It is almost 
impossible to conceive of a written text as its own being, unchanged by 
interpretation; but the oral text is its own being. There are no repeated oral 
texts; each occurs only once, in the context of its original performance, and is 
nearly impossible to record. One can tape or videotape a children's "show" 
just as one can tape a folkloristic storytelling session, yet neither performance 
is reproducible in the way that a Broadway musical is reproducible. 

The "show" is in a sense an ideal situation, because it brings text and 
performance together. Unfortunately, the text that occurs during these per-
formances is generally not of a very high quality; it surely lacks the superior 
verbal qualities of certain literary texts. Yet literary texts cannot ever truly 
exist as pure "text"; they are always subject to interpretation. As text and 
performance become more sophisticated, they also grow apart from each 
other, more separate. The categories of childhood's performance became 
more clearly delineated as I grew older. Actors and directors, audience and 
performers ceased to be one and the same; the categories became bounded. 
Roles became clearly defined; the show became organized. But as an adult, 
the "show" no longer exists. The new awareness of boundaries causes 
enthusiasm for the show to die out. At fourteen I was no longer an active 
performer in our shows; I organized them for a few years after that, but when 
my cousins grew older they no longer wanted to perform in them either. I 
cannot say whether we suddenly thought of the shows as "childish," or 
whether we had finally achieved whatever mastery the shows gave to us. We 
look back on these performances as good performances, but we do not miss 
them. 

University of Pennsylvania 

Works Cited 

Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 

27 



 

Wein 
Bauman, Richard. Verbal Art as Perfomance. Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc, 
 1977. 

Eifennann, Rivka R. "Children's Games, Observed and Experienced." In The Psy 
 choanalytic Study of the Child. Vol. 42. New Haven: Yale U P, 1987. 

28 



 

Children's Folklore Section: 1990 Annual Meeting 

Twenty current (and prospective) members of the 
Children's Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society 
gathered on Friday, 19 October 1990, for a business meeting 
and breakfast. President Priscilla Ord called the meeting to 
order at 7:14 a.m. 

As those present feasted (so to speak) on a continental 
breakfast, Priscilla reviewed corrections to the 1989 meeting 
minutes, and the minutes were passed as corrected. 

Vice-President Tom Johnson reported that no 1990 Newell 
Prize was awarded because no entries were received during the 
submission period. The reason, perhaps, was the recent change 
in the submission date. Entries for the 1991 prize (for papers 
written during the calendar year 1990) are already coming in. 
The submission deadline is March 1. For more information, 
contact Tom Johnson. 

Secretary-Treasurer Danielle Roemer reported that, as of 
31 August 1990, the Section had a balance of $3610.57 (which 
included the $2000.00 endowment for the Opie Prize) and had 
earned more than $100.00 in interest during the 1990 year. 
Currently, the Section has 77 members: 52 domestic and 25 
foreign. Danielle also reminded those present that Section 
renewal notices are now being sent out as part of the AFS 
yearly renewal notice. The Section is working with the AFS/ 
American Anthropological Association office to correct any 
glitches in the system. If a member has problems with his or her 
Section membership or renewal, he or she should contact 
Danielle Roemer. June Factor asked if Section members needed 
to be members of AFS. Danielle explained that, according to 
Tim Lloyd (AFS Secretary-Treasurer), AFS will send renewal 
notices to all CFS members, whether they are AFS members or 
not. 

Archivist Simon Bronner asked the membership to send 
the Archives copies of papers on children's folklore, written 
and/or delivered. 

CFR Editor Chip Sullivan passed out copies of the Review, 
appearing for the first time in its new journal format. He 
reported that the cost of this format is approximately the same 
as that of the previous newsletter. Chip also announced that the 
Section's Executive Board had approved opening the journal to 
advertising. He will notify by letter those publishing houses that 
might be interested. A question was raised concerning the 
criteria, if any, for Ads accepted for the 

29 



 

CFS 

Review. The Executive Board will take up the question during the coming 
year. Simon Bronner asked about the relevance to the Review of papers and 
other materials treating the folklore of adolescents and suggested that Chip 
offer guidelines in some future "From the Editor." 

Chip also announced that Judith Haut has agreed to serve as Book 
Review Editor for the Review. Members should contact her if they have 
books they wish to review or wish to suggest for review (2733 Halsey Road, 
Topanga, CA 90290). 

Linda Morley moved that the Section express its appreciation to Chip for 
his editorial efforts in moving our publication from a newsletter to a review 
journal. The motion was seconded and passed by acclamation. 

The Opie Prize Committee (Joe Edgette and Danielle Roemer) an-
nounced the winner of the 1990 Opie Prize to be Simon Bronner for his 
American Children's Folklore. Those present congratulated Simon with a 
hearty round of applause. 

In discussion, members raised the possibility of changing the Opie Prize  
award to something other than a solely cash award Jay Mechling will 
investigate the feasibility and cost of additional means of recognition such as 
a certificate, a trophy, or the like. Members were reminded that contributions 
to the Opie Prize Fund are tax-deductible and very welcome. Contributions 
can be sent to Danielle Roemer. 

The following officers were then elected or re-elected by acclamation: 
Judith Haut as Vice President and Danielle Roemer as Secretary-Treasurer. 
Appointments reconfirmed by acclamation were Simon Bronner as Archivist 
and Chip Sullivan as CFR Editor. 

The discussion turned to raising Section dues. Chip reminded us that 
mailing rates will increase, and Danielle summarized the cumulative impact 
on the treasury of the various prizes we award. At present, only the Newell 
Prize is completely paid for by annual earned interest. Members present voted 
to raise the dues to $10.00/year effective 1 January 1991. However, anyone 
paying for a 1991 membership on or before 30 December 1990 can receive a 
membership for the old rate of $5.00/year. The members present also 
approved the category of Section Life Membership. Monies acquired in this 
way will be added to the Opie Prize endowment Linda Morley moved that the 
Life Membership rate be calculated at twenty times the subscription rate of 1 
January 1991. The cost would therefore be $200.00. The proposal was 
seconded and passed 

Linda Morley then reported on the Lifetime Achievement Medal. In 
spite of the Section's prior decision to allocate $200.00 plus the matching 
funds from the AFS Centennial Committee, there was a cost overrun of 
$194.00. Joe Edgette moved that the Section authorize payment for this 
overrun. The motion was seconded and passed. Danielle moved that the 
Section express its gratitude to Linda for her efforts in bringing out the 

30 



 

1990 Annual Meeting 

medal. The motion was seconded and passed by acclamation. It was 
suggested that a letter of appreciation be sent to artist Armond Szainer 
thanking him for his valuable contribution and assistance. 

It was announced that any Section member can nominate someone for 
the Lifetime Achievement Award. Members present then discussed and 
agreed to establish a nominating committee, appointed by the CFS Presi-
dent, for the next Lifetime Award 

Tom Johnson then led a discussion of possible changes to the Section's 
Constitution and By-Laws. It was suggested that the title of Vice-President 
be changed to that of President-Elect; that the out-going President serve for 
two years as Past-President, that the Executive Board appoint a Book 
Review Editor for CFR who would not be a member of the Executive 
Board, that the CFR Editor appoint an Editorial Board for CFR which 
would be separate from the Executive Board, and that the CFR Editor's term 
be for three years and be renewable. Simon Bronner moved that the proposed 
changes be sent to the membership for a vote. The motion was seconded and 
passed. 

With the introduction of new business, Priscilla turned the chair over to 
Tom Johnson, in-coming President. 

Jay Meching and Gary Alan Fine raised the possibility of the Section's 
awarding a prize for the best children's book incorporating children's folklore 
or to the best book of folklore for children and that the prize be called the 
Brian Sutton-Smith Prize. Linda Morley suggested that the Section announce 
its decision as to the best book rather than offer a cash award. Margaret Read 
MacDonald expressed her support for the prize, saying that the Section's 
accolade would be valuable to publishers and readers of children's books. 
Chip advised that we would need to be very clear about the criteria of the 
prize to distinguish it from the Opie Prize. Gary moved that a committee be 
established to investigate such a prize and that it make its recommendations 
to the Executive Board. The motion was seconded and passed. Judith Haut 
moved that this be an ad hoc committee of two who would propose 
guidelines for the prize and make their recommendations to the Executive 
Board. The motion was seconded and passed. Gary Alan Fine and Linda 
Morley agreed to serve on this committee. 

Judith Haut raised the possibility of a Section-sponsored panel at the 
1991 Newfoundland AFS meeting. She expressed the concern, shared by 
others, about attendance at that meeting. It was suggested that authors unable 
to attend might ask someone else to deliver their papers. It was pointed out 
that it is against AFS policy to write a paper with the explicit intent of having 
someone else deliver it. Bill Ellis raised the possibility of a Section-
sponsored open forum at Newfoundland. Judith will investigate offering a 
panel/forum. Edith Fowke volunteered to chair a panel on children's folklore. 

31 



 

CFS 

Under announcements, the following were reported: 
(1) The Association for the Anthropological Study of Play (TAASP) 

will meet 14-16 March 1991 in Charleston, SC. The meeting will be held 
jointly with those of the American Ethnological Society and the Society for 
Applied Anthropology; 
 (2) Edith Fowke announced that the Canadian Folklore Society will 
 meet prior to the AFS meeting in Newfoundland; 
 (3) The Handbook is (still) being put on computer disks. 
 The meeting was adjourned at 9:29 a.m. 

Respectfully submitted, 

Danielle Roemer 
Secretary-Treasurer 

32 



 

BOOK REVIEW 

COSBEY, ROBERT. All in Together, Girls: Skipping Songs from 
Regina, Saskatchewan. Regina: University of Regina, 1980. 101p. pb. 

This small book is the first analytical study of children's 
lore in Canada. Robert Cosbey, an ex-American then teaching 
at Regina University, collected skipping songs from skippers 
between 1972 and 1978. He presents 114 different songs and 
57 variants from 21 separate schools in Regina. 

He begins with some comments on the range of skipping 
and its history and then questions the general assumption that 
skipping is a group activity of girls developed at the close of 
the nineteenth century. He argues that skipping was already an 
established tradition by the middle of the nineteenth century 
and that we have no way of knowing how much older than that 
it may be. 

He presents skippers as a folk group, discusses the 
sources, transmission, and changes of the rhymes, and 
describes and analyzes the performance of skipping. He says 
that children follow rigid rules: everybody gets a turn, and 
there is no competition. He analyzes the content of the texts, 
noting that some are used to foretell events, others express 
anxieties about sickness and death, some contain a somewhat 
satirical attitude toward adults, and some exhibit a complete 
naturalness about sexual encounters. He quotes: 

Along came Johnny swinging on a chain, 
Down went his zipper and out it came. 
Three months later you could really tell. 
Nine months later out they came 
Two little greasers swinging their chains. 

He notes that the informant who gave him this rhyme re-
marked: "It was not that the song was bad, but the adults 
always took it the wrong way. They took it literally while we 
took it as just another skipping song." 

Edith Fowke 
Toronto 

33 



 

Sue Samuelson (1956-1991) 
Simon Bronner 

Few people imagined that Sue Samuelson's address at the 
1990 AFS Meeting would be her last. Having already made her 
mark in folklore and folklife scholarship with college teaching 
positions, consultancies, papers at professional meetings, 
articles, book chapters, and books, she was too young to 
contemplate the end of life, no less the end of a career. But 
sadly she died on 17 January 1991 after more than two years of 
fighting lung cancer. She was 34 years old. 

Sue received a B.A. in anthropology at the University of 
California at Berkeley, where Alan Dundes introduced her to 
folklore scholarship. She was awarded the Steager Folklore 
Prize there her senior year. She entered law school, but 
withdrew after a week and went to UCLA for an M.A. in the 
folklore and mythology program and then to the University of 
Pennsylvania for her Ph.D. in folklore and folklife. At Penn, 
she wrote her dissertation on Christmas celebrations in America 
and developed the research interests in festivals, foodways, the 
folklore of children and adolescents, modem legendry, and 
applied folklore that would remain with her throughout her 
career. 

In recent years, Sue was especially active in the Children's 
Folklore Section (as Secretary-Treasurer and as Vice President) 
and the Foodways Section (as Conveener) of the American 
Folklore Society. She prepared a chapter on the transition from 
childhood to adolescence for the forthcoming Handbook on 
children's folklore sponsored by the Children's Folklore 
Section, and she collaborated with Ted and Lin Humphrey on 
the introduction to "We Gather Together": Food and Festival in 
American Life (1988). The Foodways Section has named its 
prize for the best student paper after Sue. 

A more complete tribute to Sue, along with a complete 
bibliography of her scholarship, will appear in an upcoming 
issue of the J ournal of American Folklore. 

Penn State-Harrisburg 

34 



 

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS 
The Children's Folklore Review is available only to 

members of the Children's Folklore Section of the American 
Folklore Society. To become a CFS member, send $10.00 
yearly dues to Danielle Roemer, Literature and Language, 
Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, KY 41076. 

Additions/Corrections to Volume 13. Number 1: 

 Volume 13, Number 1, should also be identified as Fall 
1990. 

The articles by Nicola Hurlston and Linda Riley, identified 
as the 1990 Newell Prize winners on the Contents page, were 
actually the 1989 Newell Prize winners. 

The article ending on page 24 should have as its last 
sentence: "They're the men who don't want to admit they're 
doing it, because it's not a macho activity." A correction slip 
was included in 13.1. 

The cover of 13.1 is Millais' "The Woodman's Daughter" 
(1850-51). 

ALA Awards 

The American Library Association has honored folk 
guitarists Dave Van Ronk and Doc Watson. Each received an 

ALA 1991 Notable Children's Recording Award. Van 
Ronk received his award for Peter and the Wolf, adapted for 
jugband by Billy Novak and narrated by Von Ronk who 
conceived of the project. Watson received his award for Doc 
Watson Sings Songs for Little Pickers, a collection of tradi-
tional songs, most of which were recorded live at a concert in 
Atlanta. Watson's album has also received a Grammy 
nomination in the Best Children's Album category. Contact: 
Alcazar Records, Box 249, Waterbury, VT 05676, for more 
details, a free catalog, or to order. 

Youth Culture in Sweden 

The research program Youth Culture in Sweden aims at 
exploring central aspects of today's Swedish youth culture. It 
focuses on four themes: Modernization, Gender, Style, and 

35 



 

Notes and Announcements 

Spheres. It was started in 1988 and is the main responsibility of musicologist 
and youth culture researcher Johan Fomas. The program, which now 
includes about 50 researchers and post graduate students, is financed by the 
Swedish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and is 
also supported by Allmanna Bamhuset. For additional information, write: 
Johan Fomas, Media and Cultural Theory, University of Stockholm, S-106, 
91, Stockholm, Sweden. 

Folklife in Education 
Special Issue of Southern Folklore 

Camilla A. Collins, Editor 
Nancy A. Nusz, Special Editor 

 
A 1988 American Folklore Society panel provided the impetus for this 

insightful overview of the development of fo1k1ife in education and its 
implementation in specific programs. The papers that evolved from that 
session and the additional ones solicited for this issue constitute a marker of 
the progress made by folklorists in public education and critically examine 
the future of this field. Topics addressed include the historical development 
of folk art in education programs, intercultural education, collaborative 
efforts between fo1k1orists and art teachers, folklore in prison education, 
curriculum materials for folklife education, and folk1ore and teaching 
English as a second language. 
 Special Editor Nancy A. Nusz provides an Introduction and a Selected 
Bibliography. 

Contributors include Peggy A. Bulger, Karen Compton, Kristin G. 
Congdon, Gregory Hansen, Michael Kline, Rita Moonsammy, Nancy A. 
Nusz, and Janis Rosenberg. 
 F olklife in Education is available from the University of Kentucky 
Press at a cost of $10.00 

36 



 

CFR will accept manuscripts on 3 1/2" disks if the manuscript 
was typed using Microsoft Word or MacWrite on a Macintosh 
computer. 

We request that, if possible, authors using typewriters or dot-
matrix printers have their manuscripts redone and a laser 
printed copy made. This will enable us to scan the copy, 
thereby eliminating rekeying the manuscript. 

Please send manuscripts to: 

C. W. Sullivan III, Editor 
Children's Folklore Review 
Department of English East 
Carolina University 
Greenville, NC 27858-4353 

Children's Folklore Review is published twice a year and sent 
to all members of the Children's Folklore Section of the 
American Folklore Society. 

Published by East Carolina University ISSN: 
0739-5558 Copyright @ 1991 Children's 

Folklore Section Printed by Morgan Printers, 
Inc. 




