“Fakelore” is a term coined in 1950 by American folklorist Richard M. Dorson (1916–1981) to describe anthologies and commercial materials that are presented as authentic oral folklore, but are actually fabricated or heavily edited. This label has been used to describe wholly new creations originating from a single author, those that put characters from folklore into nontraditional situations, those that have undergone serious editorial revisions, and those that use these characters and legends for commercial or ideological purposes. It has also come to describe Internet hoaxes and urban legends that falsely claim to have folklore origins. Fakelore is considered to be a type of fraud, and so the term is always applied with a tone of disapproval. However, some scholars argue that materials once dismissively labeled “fakelore” are actually rich areas for study, and question whether the distinction between folklore and fakelore is truly as unambiguous as the names suggest.
Dorson’s list of common American fakelore characters includes Pecos Bill, John Henry, Tony Beaver, Febold Feboldson, Joe Magarac, Old Stormalong, and Annie Christmas, among many others, whom he accused of being products of print and commercial distribution rather than genuine characters of folklore with “oral vitality.” Dorson’s exemplar case of fakelore is Paul Bunyan. He and other scholars, including Stanley Edgar Hyman and Daniel Hoffman, claimed that, though Bunyan tales had some small origin in logging folklore, the narratives published in the treasuries of Benjamin A. Botkin and Ben Clough, claiming to originate from logging camps across America, were drawn from inauthentic sources and editorially reworked. Instead of originating from logging camps, Bunyan lore was largely popularized by William B. Laughead (1897–1958), who wrote and illustrated promotional material for the Red River Lumber Company; James MacGillivray, who penned the Paul Bunyan story “The Round River Drive”; and newspaper editors who appropriated the quickly iconic name and image for social events and tourism. Resulting folklore treasuries incorporated these commercially motivated tales, newspaper articles, creative endeavors, and jokes, as well as oral folktales, creating no distinction between the tales that would have been told and retold in logging camps and the single-authored narratives that were merely inspired by an idealized version of the characters and setting. It was this distinction between tales actually told by folk and those that merely took on the guise of authentic folklore as a means to sell products and attract tourists that Dorson wanted to infuse into the academic discipline of folklore studies through use of the label “fakelore.” By treating all sources with the same weight, Dorson saw a vulgarization in the study of folklore that was both misrepresentative and potentially harmful.
The Blair Witch Project
Perhaps no example of manufactured folklore in recent decades has captured the popular imagination quite like the film The Blair Witch Project. Released in 1999, Blair Witch was shot for a few tens of thousands of dollars in documentary format, purporting to be “found footage,” the only record left behind by doomed film students who wandered into the woods looking for an icon of local folklore, never to return. This premise found traction and launched a Blair Witch popular phenomenon, simultaneously paving the way for numerous other found footage films. Perhaps most notable of all, one could argue that The Blair Witch Project recast the nascent Internet hoax genre into a brilliant marketing ploy, using a website that treated the film as an actual documentary, claiming that the relevant footage was discovered by archaeologists under a century-old foundation a year after the disappearance of the lost filmmakers.
C. Fee
In addition to its application to Bunyan lore, fakelore has long been a part of the Anglo-American appropriation of other cultures’ lore, including Native American folklore. Tourist literature and children’s books often distort and even wholly invent Native American “legends.” In Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, Peter Nabokov and Lawrence L. Loendorf identify multiple examples of Native American fakelore created by tourist guides in Yellowstone National Park, featuring stereotypes and tropes such as fatal love-pacts, dim-witted natives frightened by geysers, and magic hexes. These fabricated narratives originally may have had the purpose of multicultural awareness, environmental education, and entertainment but could, instead, do harm. Dorson claimed that these false narratives are “a chauvinist and fascist conception of folklore,” and in an online article dealing with false multicultural lore Eliot A. Singer declares, “Fakelore makes a mockery of teaching diversity” (Dorson 1950; Singer 2000). Instances of fakelore such as these may not be merely harmless hoaxes, but have the potential to do real damage by reinforcing historically inaccurate and racist beliefs about certain cultures, and by displacing indigenous lore.
Besides incorporating an inaccurate claim to authenticity, several factors supposedly aid in differentiating folklore from fakelore. Dorson advises the student of folklore to beware of paraphrased tales without accompanying notes and a full disclosure of sources. The shared characteristics between fakelore narratives can also make them distinguishable from authentic folklore. One of these factors is the length of the narrative. In contrast to the lengthy and cohesive narratives in some anthologies of fakelore, actual folklore is often brief and fragmentary. Another factor is that fakelore will often remove obscene or graphic references to make these stories more socially acceptable for children to read. A final factor that might aid in distinguishing folklore from fakelore is the geographic range that the lore claims. Whereas folklore that is purely oral will likely have a very limited range of influence, anthologies that claim to cover the folklore of a whole nation should be suspect; according to Dorson, folklore only exists within small groups.
However, even at the time Dorson invented the label, fakelore was a controversial matter. Published directly following Dorson’s prominent article “Folklore and Fake Lore” in the March 1950 issue of The American Mercury, James Stevens (1892–1971), one of the authors whom Dorson criticized, responded that the storyteller who uses folklore as a means of inspiration in crafting new narratives is a legitimate artist in the vein of Mark Twain and Lord Byron. The distinction of folklore and fakelore, Stevens argued, was one only relevant to anthropologists, not artists and folklorists, who rightfully manipulate cultural materials that belong to everyone. Creative expressions based on folklore have also been referred to as pseudofolklore, folklorism, or folkorismus; however, even though these labels can refer to texts that actively masquerade as authentic folklore, they do not usually carry the same pejorative sense as “fakelore.”
It is exactly this creative reuse of folklore that makes the line between fakelore and folklore difficult to distinguish and puts the concept at risk for oversimplification. Narratives initially labeled fakelore can influence or become folklore themselves through retellings and incorporation into a folk tradition. Though Paul Bunyan lore was initially largely commercially created, some have argued that Bunyan has become so infused into our conception of American folk history that it has made the transition from fake to folk. “Revivals” of folklore and folk festivals are also problematic for the concept because, while the lore is authentic to a particular culture, the performance within the festival would not necessarily be. Oral manipulation and transmutation of narratives is one of the key factors in the identity of folklore, but it is this potential for mutation that gives any lore the potential to shift status from fake to folk and back again.
In fact, contemporary Americans may be more likely to first meet folklore in a transmuted or commercialized form, rather than as pure oral performance. Particularly in this postmodern commercial and digital age, valuing oral performance as “authentic” and more valuable than print and digital material to the study of a culture’s traditions is itself a flawed concept. American folklore has often extended beyond oral lore to other media such as songs, theater, literature, visual art, and commercial art. Today, these media are not merely echoes of a folk tradition, but build upon one another, making them interesting to academic study concerned with cultural narratives. Due to widespread global consumerism and the prevalence of print and digital consumption, the purely noncommercial, uncontaminated oral folklore that Dorson was concerned with would be difficult, if not impossible, to collect today.
The negative effects of fakelore also comprise a disputed area. Folklorist Alan Dundes (1934–2005) also criticized Dorson’s negative view of fakelore with examples such as James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, which were creative fabrications presented as genuine translations of Scottish verse. According to Dundes, Macpherson’s fakelore actually had the positive effect of stimulating interest in native oral poetry. Texts that could be labeled “fakelore” might provide shared understandings between cultures, maintain cultural identity, and be used as positive national emblems of progress. Furthermore, displaced and marginalized cultures, such as former African American slaves and Native Americans, may invent folklore as a means of reclaiming cultural legitimacy.
Yogisms
From time to time an individual is quotable enough to become a fount of gnomic sayings, a source of ersatz folk wisdom that enters common lore and parlance. Yogi Berra, an All-Star and Hall of Fame catcher for the New York Yankees, was such a figure. Berra was a remarkable ballplayer from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, but his real legacy in the ensuing decades was the often paradoxical pearls of wisdom he cast into the broader culture. As Berra opined, “you can observe a lot by watching,” but “if you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” That’s okay, though, because “if the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.” At the time of his death in 2015, the 90-year-old Berra had eight phrases credited to him in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations; as he put it, “it ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
C. Fee
Many scholars have eschewed the term “fakelore” as needlessly judgmental and exclusive, particularly in a digital age that is rapidly breaking down distinctions between oral and literary culture. However, somewhat ironically, the label “fakelore” has taken on a folk life of its own apart from the control and concern of scholars. Today, there are blogs dedicated to the debunking of so-called contemporary fakelore, such as Slender Man, Roswell, UFOs, and Bigfoot. The term “fakelore” may be undergoing a transmutation itself as it transitions from an academic concern with folklore authentic to specific cultures, to a label describing the unreality of urban myth.
Sandra M. Leonard
See also American Folklore Society (AFS); Folklore and Folktales; Paul Bunyan; Racism in Urban Legends; Urban Legends/Urban Belief Tales
Further Reading
Dorson, Richard M. 1950. “Folklore and Fake Lore.” The American Mercury 70 (315): 335–343.
Dorson, Richard M. 1976. Folklore and Fakelore: Essays toward a Discipline of Folk Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dundes, Alan. 1989. Folklore Matters. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Hill, Sharon. 2013. “The Internet: A Superhighway of Paranormal Hoaxes and Fakelore.” Huffington Post, July 14.
Hoffman, Daniel. 1952. Paul Bunyan: Last of the Frontier Demigods. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Huffington Post. May 14. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-hill/paranormal-hoaxesfakelore_b_3263955.html. Accessed May 20, 2015.
Nabokov, Peter, and Lawrence Loendorf. 2002. Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Singer, Eliot A. 2000. “Fakelore, Multiculturalism, and the Ethics of Children’s Literature.” https://www.msu.edu/user/singere/fakelore.html. Accessed May 20, 2015.