Chapter II

2.1 American folklore

American folklore has three main sources: Folklore Indians, blacks, and folklore of the white settlers. The question of the folklore of the indigenous population of North America - the American Indians has always been actual. Discussions on this issue usually went beyond the narrow limits of scientists dispute, always had the public interest. It is not surprising. As we know, the Indians on the time of the discovery of the New world achieved relatively high levels of culture. Of course, they were inferior to Europeans in the culture of metal or land, in the culture of construction, etc.But if we talk about the "culture of freedom," they were always on the top. They didn't become slaves of white, even when white deprived of their main livelihood and destroyed all bisons — the main source of life of North American Indians [4, p.7].

This need of Indians to feel always free is also a key for understanding of their folklore. Indian Fairy tales resurrect the beauty of virgin forests and endless prairies, sing brave and harmonious character of an Indian hunter, an Indian warrior an Indian leader. They narrate about the tender love and loving heart, the brave deeds in the name of love; their heroes struggle with the evil, and cunning, upholding honesty, integrity and nobility. In the fairy tales Indians simply talk to trees and animals, with stars, with the Moon and the Sun, with mountains and a wind. Fantastic and real for them it is inseparable. So we can see perception of life Indians.

A new nation, born suddenly in a seventeenth-century wilderness, possessed neither cultural nor folk traditions to call its own. Yet in a relatively short span an American civilization has arisen on the naked earth, endowed with distinctive institutions, literature, behavior, and folklore. The shaping of this folklore commenced with the first landings of explorers, and drew from two heritages, the uprooted European and the native Indian, blended in the crucible of a strange, fierce land.

The European settlers who crossed the Atlantic ocean in the seventeenth century brought with them a host of supernatural beliefs which colored their views of the universe. Learned men and common folk alike gave credence to demons and hags, ghouls and specters of the midnight darkness and regulated their lives with signs, charms, and exorcisms innumerable [4, p.9]. In the eighteenth century the tides of rationalism would sweep away many “vulgar errors,” as Sir Thomas Browne had called the grosser superstitions. But for the first hundred years of colonization, supernatural explanations in terms of God and the Devil ruled the thinking of governor and cleric as well as fanner and servant. English colonists viewed the fantastic world they encountered, and interpreted their novel experiences through the concepts of witchcraft, demonology, and divine providences. Hence the settlement of America generated powerful folk traditions which would form an enduring, if little understood, legacy of American civilization. What we may call American folklore resulted from the grafting of Old World beliefs onto the New World environment, and the generation of new folk fancies within old forms.

These fantastic stories being exchanged, in the gossipy report of one seventeenth-century traveler to New England, John Josselyn. Approaching the American coast in 1638, his ship sighted two sail bound for Newfoundland and hove to for news. “They told us of a general earthquake in New England, of the birth of a monster at Boston, in the Massachusetts Bay a mortality.” After landing and joining a group of “Neighboring gentlemen” who came to welcome him into the new country, Josselyn heard more of these wondrous occurrences in fuller detail. One told of a young lion killed at Piscataway by an Indian, and another of a sea serpent coiled up like a cable on a rock at Cape Ann, which an Englishman in a passing boat would have shot, had not two Indians dissuaded him, saying if he were not killed outright they would all be in danger of their lives. Thereupon a Mr. Mittin capped them both with an account of a merman who tried to clamber into his canoe while he was out fowling in Maine’s Casco Bay; he chopped off the creature’s hand with a hatchet, and the merman sunk beneath the water, staining it with purple blood. Now under the heat of the story-swapping, Mr. Fox- well came forth and related how he had passed a night at sea in a small shallop, hugging the shore but afraid to land; suddenly at midnight a loud voice called him, “Foxwell, Foxwell, come ashore,” and upon the beach he beheld a great fire ringed by dancing men and women. After an hour they vanished, and next morning Foxwell put ashore and found their footprints and brands’ ends on the sand. But no living Englishman or Indian could he find on shore or in the woods.