Journals Week: Folklore

Folklore is the journal of The Folklore Society and has been in print under a few changing titles since 1878--Folk-lore Record and Folk-lore Journal--making it one of the oldest journals devoted to folklore and fairy tales.

Folklore is also relatively affordable for the student and armchair enthusiast since it comes with individual membership to The Folklore Society. In addition, other benefits are offered such as access through JSTOR to all Folklore issues (don't need an academic subscription!).

Here's the official list of benefits: "Benefits of Folklore Society membership include: receipt of FLS News, access to JSTOR's electronic archive of back-numbers of Folklore; information about publications and events, preferential rates for some events and publications, and access to FLS information services and library."

Here are the 2009 Membership Rates for the Folklore Society:

Ordinary membership: US$81/£45
Household membership: US$90/£50
Reduced membership (Students, Unwaged, Pensioners): US$50/£28 (proof of status required)

Aims and scope from the website:

•Folklore is one of the earliest English-language journals in the field of folkloristics, first published as Folk-Lore Record in 1878.

•Folklore publishes ethnographical and analytical essays on vernacular culture worldwide, specialising in traditional language, narrative, music, song, dance, drama, foodways, medicine, arts and crafts, and popular religion and belief. It reviews current scholarship in a wide range of adjacent disciplines including cultural studies, popular culture, cultural anthropology, ethnology and social history.

•Folklore prides itself on its special mix of ethnography, analysis and debate, formal and informal articles, reviews, review essays and bibliographies. It encompasses both North American and European approaches to the study of folklore and covers not only the materials and processes of folklore, but also the history, methods and theory of folkloristics.

•Folklore aims to be lively, informative and accessible, whilst maintaining high standards of scholarship.

Folklore has a great history of scholarship that is ongoing today. It is the journal in which many of the earliest well-known folklore and fairy tale scholars published their research and findings. It is also where they sparred over theories. You'll find Andrew Lang, Joseph Jacobs, W. R. S. Ralston, Marian Roalfe Cox and many others represented in its early issues.

All you need is internet access to read much of the scholarship published in the early years of the journal's 120 year history since many of the issues have been digitized by Google in Google Books. Unfortunately, they are not well organized and searching them is an exquisite kind of torture all too often, but they are there. I am hoping for better indexing and searching in the future as Google Books organizes itself better. Here's an example: The Folk-lore journal, Volume 7 By Folklore Society.

If you aren't interested in subscribing, individual articles from the past several years are also available for a fee through InformaWorld. If you follow that link, you can also peruse the table of contents and abstracts (not all articles have abstracts) from the last ten years of issues.

Folklore is Abstracted/Indexed in:

Anthropological Index Online; B H A Bibliography of the History of Art; Bibliography of Native North Americans; British Humanities Index; Current Abstracts; Humanities Index; Humanities International Index; International Bibliography of the Social Sciences; Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts; M L A International Bibliography (Modern Language Association of America); OCLC; Periodicals Index Online; ProQuest Central; Religion Index One: Periodicals; Thomson Reuters' Arts & Humanities Citation Index.

Reminder: Please read Call for Contributions: Graduate Programs Information and send me an email if you have a contribution.