Gettin’ this blog off the ground

Exams are over, which means the summer has officially begun. I’ve managed to squeeze in a trip to Spain already — in other words, things are off to an auspicious start. The highlight by far was The Alhambra,
a Muslim palace that passed into the hands of invading Christians a few centuries ago. There were so many gardens that it took us most of five hours to hike all the way through it. I wrote home to tell my parents I had found my next Christmas present; they were not amused.

With a weekend left in Dublin for my spring semester, it’s time to take stock and start looking ahead to the summer. I didn’t do a fantastic job with the blog, although there are a few pictures and some good entries on the Cliffs of Moher and other Irish landmarks. (That blog should still be up here if you’re interested.) But as my pints and pub visits continue to dwindle, I’m starting to shift the energy toward the summer project coming up after a couple of weeks back in the States: Black Dogs, and folklore in the British Isles.

The project began with a simple question: what importance, if any, does folklore have in contemporary society? As a race, we humans are amazingly skilled at amusing ourselves. The word “folklore” conjures images of a simpler time, where people would meet in a bar or around a fire to share stories. It’s easy to see evidence of this in Ireland’s pub culture, where oldsters still get together in the afternoons for a post-workday Guinness. Nowadays, we have the Internet, Facebook, syndicated T.V. shows, sports on dozens of channels. We have live concerts and cell phone games (I spent most of a train ride between Granada and Seville trying to beat my score at Snake — I like to think of that as a reflection of human progress, rather than an indication of how boring a traveling companion I am). Do we still have anything in common with a past that embraced the more basic kind of storytelling, composed of words and fueled by the skill and charisma of the teller?

I think the only answer to this is a resounding yes. Although I can’t remember the last time I spent a Friday night with my best friends around a campfire telling ghost stories (at least, not without the assistance of a nip of Guinness, or the Black Stuff, as it’s sometimes called over here). But I do remember several times in recent memory where folktales turned up in popular literature, television, or somewhere on the Web. Open any of the Harry Potter books. Those are just one example.

We can draw an important conclusion from this: although the way we tell stories is constantly changing to reflect our progress as a civilization, the stories we tell are still much the same as the ones our ancestors told around those aforementioned fires. Narratively speaking, the story you told at lunch might be just a few steps from a tale shared at a meal a thousand years ago. Granted, these steps span centuries and whole continents, in some cases; but the ties that bind us in these ways are remarkable for their longevity.

The Black Dog is a case study in what folklore means today. I hope to cover as many bases as possible — to throw out a list of college majors, folklore not only in a cultural and social sense, but also with reference to politics and economics, if it’s possible. More on all that to come; next time, a breakdown of Black Dogs: what they are, why I chose them, and (perhaps most important) what it means if you come across one yourself.

[Edit: And by "next time," in typical blog fashion, I mean sometime down the road when there's not something else to say. This is called rationing material for the future, something Pirates of the Caribbean 2 should have thought about instead of force-feeding the movie with subplots.]