The easiest thing about drawing on folklore to write fiction? Folklore is everywhere.
The hardest thing? Folklore is everywhere. First things first though: what is folklore? Since the coinage of the word in 1846, it’s been a difficult one to define. Put simply, it’s the lore of the people – but what ‘lore’ is and who ‘the people’ are remain ambiguous. Many words penned by the hands of folklorists have been dedicated to definitions, redefinitions, and indignant semantic justifications, bandying around alternative terms (from ‘tradition’ and ‘superstition’ to ‘intangible cultural heritage’), which never quite capture the concept’s essence.
I try to keep it simple. To me, folklore is the stories we tell and the customs we practise – past
