Folklore Reimagined - But By Whom?

The phrase “folklore reimagined” is a hopeful one.

It suggests that folklore is not fixed in the past. It can be returned to, questioned, performed, sung, crafted, retold, reworked and made newly visible. It can move through books, museums, festivals, artworks, public talks and community projects. It can become something people gather around.

But it also raises another question.

Who gets to reimagine folklore?

I have been thinking about this while looking at the British Academy’s Folklore Reimagined season, which brings together talks, workshops, performances and public writing on folklore, identity, landscape, sung history, craft, witches, fairytales, omens, religion and supernatural belief. It is an exciting framing because it treats folklore as something alive: not simply a set of old stories, but a way of thinking about how people make meaning, remember, belong and connect with the past.

That matters.

For a long time, folklore has been treated as something quaint, childish, irrational or decorative. It has been allowed into public culture most easily when it becomes beautiful: a fairytale illustration, a seasonal custom, a folk song, a landscape legend, a craft tradition, a mythic image. These forms matter deeply. They hold memory, artistry and identity.

But I am also interested in the forms of folklore that are harder to make comfortable.

A charm against illness.

A death warning.

A ghost seen on a road.

A story about a house no one wanted to pass at night.

A cunning woman consulted when ordinary remedies had failed.

A belief that looks foolish if we remove it from the conditions that made it necessary.

These kinds of folklore have often been gathered under the word “superstition”. That word can look descriptive, but it is rarely neutral. It can make a belief sound irrational before we have asked what it did, who held it, or why it mattered. It can turn care into foolishness, warning into backwardness, and inherited knowledge into embarrassment.

This is where class becomes important.

Some traditions are easily reimagined as heritage. Others remain marked by shame. Working-class supernatural knowledge - charms, omens, ghost stories, folk healing, death warnings, haunted places - has often sat uneasily between fascination and dismissal. It was interesting enough to be collected, printed, displayed or repeated, but not always respected as knowledge.

A folklorist might record it.

A newspaper might mock it.

An antiquarian might preserve it as local colour.

A museum might catalogue the object but lose the life around it.

A heritage site might remember the building but not the rumours that kept people speaking about it.

This does not mean we should romanticise every belief or treat every story as straightforward evidence. Folklore is messy. It changes in the telling. It can preserve fear as well as care, prejudice as well as memory, harm as well as protection. But that is why it deserves serious attention. It shows us how people made sense of uncertainty with the materials available to them.

When I think about folklore being “reimagined”, I do not only think about making it visible again. I think about what has to change for certain forms of knowledge to become visible without being softened, cleaned up or made respectable.

Can we reimagine folklore without sanitising it?

Can we value charms without turning them into aesthetic objects only?

Can we read ghost stories as more than entertainment?

Can we take omens seriously without asking whether they were literally true?

Can we recognise working-class supernatural belief as part of cultural heritage without treating it as a curiosity from a less educated past?

For me, these questions sit at the heart of the informal archive.

An informal archive is not only made of documents. It can survive in repeated stories, remembered warnings, strange objects, local rumours, family sayings, gestures, habits and half-believed things. It can appear in the space between belief and disbelief. It can hold knowledge that formal records overlook because it is domestic, oral, emotional, regional, classed or difficult to prove.

Folklore is often reimagined when it enters public culture. But before it is reimagined, it has already been imagined, used and carried by people. It has already done work.

It may have helped someone explain illness.

It may have warned children away from danger.

It may have given shape to grief.

It may have made a frightening place legible.

It may have offered protection when formal protection was absent.

It may have preserved the memory of something that official records did not care to hold.

This is why I am interested in what happens when folklore moves from everyday life into archive, museum, book, lecture, festival or exhibition. Something is gained: preservation, attention, legitimacy, new audiences. But something can also be lost: voice, context, uncertainty, use, class, need.

To reimagine folklore well, I think we have to ask not only what folklore means now, but what it once did for the people who carried it.

Who needed this story?

Who repeated it?

Who was believed?

Who was laughed at?

Who wrote it down?

Who changed the wording?

Who decided it was folklore rather than knowledge?

The British Academy’s Folklore Reimagined season is valuable because it places folklore within public thought again. It recognises folklore as something that shapes identity, community and connection. My own question sits beside that: when folklore becomes newly visible, how do we make sure that the less comfortable forms come with it?

Not only the beautiful customs.

Not only the fairytales.

Not only the songs and landscapes.

But also the charms, warnings, rumours, ghosts, omens and strange survivals that tell us something about ordinary life under pressure.

Folklore can be reimagined as art, performance, history and heritage. But it can also be re-read as knowledge.

And if we are going to reimagine folklore, perhaps we should begin by asking what it already knew.