Here are 125 magnificent folktales collected from anthologies and journals published from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with tales of the ancient times and continuing through the arrival of the saints in Ireland in the fifth century, the periods of war and family, the Literary Revival championed by William Butler Yeats, and the contemporary era, these robust and funny, sorrowful and heroic stories of kings, ghosts, fairies, treasures, enchanted nature, and witchcraft are set in cities, villages, fields, and forests from the wild western coast to the modern streets of Dublin and Belfast. Edited by Henry Glassie With black-and-white illustrations throughout Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library
In the time of the Troubles, when bombs blew through the night and soldiers prowled down the roads, Henry Glassie came to the Irish borderland to learn how country people endure through history. He settled into the farming community of Ballymenone, beside Lough Erne in the County Fermanagh, and listened to the old people. For a decade he heard and recorded the stories and songs in which they outlined their culture, recounted their history, and pictured their world. In their view, their world was one of love, defeat, and uncertainty, demanding the virtues of endurance: faith, bravery, and wit. Glassie's task in this book is to set the scene, to sketch the backdrop and clear the stage, so that Hugh Nolan and Michael Boyle, Peter Flanagan, Ellen Cutler, and their neighbors can tell their own tale, which explains their conditions and converts them into a tragedy of conflict and a comedy of the absurd. It gathers the saints and warriors, and celebrates the stars whose wit enabled endurance in days of violence and deprivation. With patience and respect, Glassie describes life in a time and a place exactly like no other, and yet Ballymenone is like a thousand other places where people work on the land during the day and tell their own tales at night, forgotten, while the men of power fill the newspapers and history books by sending poor boys out to be killed. The Stars of Ballymenone is an integrated analysis of the complete repertory of verbal art from a rural community where storytelling and singing of quality remained a part of daily life.
Coming into being, the work of art, this very pot, creates relations--relations between nature and culture, between the individual and society, between utility and beauty. Governed by desire, the artist's work answers questions of value. Is nature favored, or culture? Are individual needs or social needs more important? Do utilitarian or aesthetic concerns dominate in the transformation of nature?" --from the Introduction The Potter's Art discusses and illustrates the work of modern masters of traditional ceramics from Bangladesh, Sweden, various parts of the United States, Turkey, and Japan. It will appeal to anyone interested in pottery and the study of folklore and folk art. Henry Glassie is College Professor of Folklore and Co-director of Turkish Studies at Indiana University. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the National Humanities Institute; he has also served as President of the Vernacular Architecture Forum and of the American Folklore Society. Material Culture--Henry Glassie, George Jevremovic, and William T. Sumner, editors (Note: there is an accent egue on the c Jevremovic) Contents: The Potter's Art Bangladesh Sweden Georgia Acoma Turkey Japan Hagi Work in the Clay Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
Based on thirty-five years of fieldwork, Glassie's Vernacular Architecture synthesizes a career of concern with traditional building. He articulates the key principles of architectural analysis, and then, centering his argument in the United States, but drawing comparative examples from many locations in Europe and Asia, he shows how architecture can be a prime resource for the one who would write a democratic and comprehensive history.
A beautifully written exploration of a vanishing holiday ritual that can be traced back to the dramas of the sixteenth century and beyond." --Philadelphia Inquirer
In this fascinating analysis of eighteenth-century vernacular houses of Middle Virginia, Henry Glassie presents a revolutionary and carefully constructed methodology for looking at houses and interpreting from them the people who built and used them. Glassie believes that all relevant historical evidence - unwritten as well as written - must be taken into account before historical truth can be found. He in convinced that any study of man's past must make use of nonverbal and verbal evidence, since written history - the story of man as recorded by the intellectual elite - does not tell us much about the everyday life, thoughts, and fears of the ordinary people of the past. Such people have always been in the majority, however, and a way has to be found to include them in any valid history. In Folk Housing in Middle Virginia Glassie admirably sets forth such a way. The people who lived in Middle Virginia in the eighteenth century are almost unknown to history because so little has been written about them. After Glassie selected the area - roughly Goochland and Louisa counties - for study, he selected a representative part of the countryside, recorded all the older houses there, developed a transformational grammar of traditional house designs, and examined the area's architectural stability and change. Comparing the houses with written accounts of the period, he found that the houses became more formal and lee related to their environment at the same time as the areas established political, economic, and religious institutions were disintegrating. It is as though the builders of the houses were deliberately trying to impose order on the surrounding chaotic world. Previous orthodox historical interpretations of the period have failed to note this. Glassie has provided new insights into the intellectual and social currents of the period, and at that time has rescued a heretofore little-known people from historiographical oblivion. Combining a fresh, perceptive approach with a broad interdisciplinary body of knowledge, ha has made an invaluable breakthrough in showing the way to understand the people of history who have left their material things as their only legacy. Henry Glassie is College Professor of Folklore at Indiana University. He is the author of Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States, passing the Time in Ballymenone, Irish Folktales, and The Spirit of Folk Art. He has served as president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum and the American Folklore Society.
Made of the words of the people who live today in the beautiful, embattled countryside of Ulster, Irish Folk History is, in essence, the people's own statement of their past. In story, song, and spontaneous essay, these texts, selected from Passing the Time in Ballymenone, tell of the coming of Christianity, of endless war, of the hardships and delights of rural life. During a time of trouble, Henry Glassie came into a community of active story-tellers in County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, and in this book he sets their voices—their chuckles, whispers, and anger—before us. The words of Hugh Nolan, Michael Boyle, of Peter Flanagan, Hugh Patrick Owens, and their neighbors, echo from the page to present a tale that is at once the story of their tiny community and the story of all of Ireland.
DANIEL JOHNSTON, raised on a farm in Randolph County, returned from Thailand with a new way to make monumental pots. Back home in North Carolina, he built a log shop and a whale of a kiln for wood-firing. Then he set out to create beautiful pots, grand in scale, graceful in form, and burned bright in a blend of ash and salt. With mastery achieved and apprentices to teach, Daniel Johnston turned his brain to massive installations. First, he made a hundred large jars and lined them along the rough road that runs past his shop and kiln. Next, he arranged curving clusters of big pots inside pine frames, slatted like corn cribs, to separate them from the slick interiors of four fine galleries in succession. Then, in concluding the second phase of his professional career, Daniel Johnston built an open-air installation on the grounds around the North Carolina Museum of Art, where 178 handmade, wood-fired columns march across a slope in a straight line, 350 feet in length, that dips and lifts with the heave while the tops of the pots maintain a level horizon. In 2000, when he was still Mark Hewitt's apprentice, Daniel Johnston met Henry Glassie, who has done fieldwork on ceramic traditions in the United States, Brazil, Italy, Turkey, Bangladesh, China, and Japan. Over the years, during a steady stream of intimate interviews, Glassie gathered the understanding that enabled him to compose this portrait of Daniel Johnston, a young artist who makes great pots in the eastern Piedmont of North Carolina.
Sacred art flourishes today in northeastern Brazil, where European and African religious traditions have intersected for centuries. Professional artists create images of both the Catholic saints and the African gods of Candomblé to meet the needs of a vast market of believers and art collectors. Over the past decade, Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla conducted intense research in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco, interviewing the artists at length, photographing their processes and products, attending Catholic and Candomblé services, and finally creating a comprehensive book, governed by a deep understanding of the artists themselves. Beginning with Edival Rosas, who carves monumental baroque statues for churches, and ending with Francisco Santos, who paints images of the gods for Candomblé terreiros, the book displays the diversity of Brazilian artistic techniques and religious interpretations. Glassie and Shukla enhance their findings with comparisons from art and religion in the United States, Nigeria, Portugal, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, and Japan and gesture toward an encompassing theology of power and beauty that brings unity into the spiritual art of the world.
Listen to the artists of the Brazilian Northeast. Their work, they say, comes of continuity and creativity. Continuity runs along lines of learning toward social coherence. Creativity brings challenges and deep personal satisfaction. What they say and do in Brazil aligns with ethnographic evidence from New Mexico and North Carolina; from Ireland, Portugal, and Italy; from Nigeria, Turkey, India, and Bangladesh; from China and Japan. This book is about that, about folk art as a sign of human unity.
Three prominent folklorists wrote these essays in the 1970s about Dorrance Weir of upstate New York and his song "Take that Night Train to Selma," Joe Scott of Maine and his song "The Plain Golden Band," and Paul Hall of Newfoundland and "The Bachelor's Song.
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