Introduction

Historians deal, by preference, with ‘hard’ realities such as family, work, and home; politics and government; church and chapel. For anthropologists, by contrast, taking the supernatural seriously is a fundamental precept of their discipline. Skilled listeners practised in dealing with oral as well as documentary evidence, they look for the crucial clues for interpreting a society as much in myth and magic and shamanism as in matters of fact. Anthropology and history have drawn much closer over the last thirty years; yet despite some fruitful theoretical borrowings, and with the important exception of African history, this rapprochement has brought surprisingly little change in historical attitudes. Folklorists, despised and ignored by professionally trained historians, are in many ways better equipped to deal with the figures of myth, and they are also plainly judging by the amount of work they produce on the subject fascinated by them.