Overview

Honourable mention for The American Folklore Society's Wayland D. Hand Prize for outstanding book combining historical and folkloristic methods and materials. Runner up for The Folklore Society's 2022 Katherine Briggs Award for most distinguished contribution to folklore studies. The little-studied and once much-feared boggart is a supernatural being from the north of England. Against the odds it survives today, both in place-names and in fantasy literature—not least the Harry Potter universe. This book pioneers two methods for collecting boggart folklore: first, the use of hundreds of thousands of words on the boggart from newly digitized ephemera; second, about 1,100 contemporary boggart memories from social media surveys and personal interviews relating to the interwar and postwar years. Combining this new data with an interdisciplinary approach involving dialectology, folklore, Victorian history, supernatural history, oral history, place-name studies and sociology, it is possible to reconstruct boggart beliefs, experiences and tales. The boggart was not, as we have been led to believe, a ‘goblin’. Rather, ‘boggart’ was a much more general term encompassing all solitary supernatural beings, from killer mermaids to headless phantoms, from black dogs to shape-changing ghouls. The author shows how in the same period that such beliefs were dying out, folklorists continually misrepresented the boggart, and explores how the modern fantasy boggart was born of these misrepresentations. As well as offering a fresh reading of associated traditions, The Boggart demonstrates some of the ways in which recent advances in digitization can offer rich rewards.

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9781905816903

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Reviews

The amount of focus, lateral thinking and sheer dogged research that has gone into this work is admirable dedication, and leavened by a light touch that makes it intensely readable throughout. -- John Billingsley * Northern Earth * In stories, plays, films and folklore collections [the boggart] became remote from the anarchic and frightening creatures of lonely lanes, deserted houses and bleak moors that the ordinary people of the nineteenth century reported. These are the stories which Young has uncovered in searching digital archives of newspapers and other ephemera, allowing us a much clearer picture of the boggart as a creature of the folk, rather than the folklorist. -- John Rimmer, Magonia Review Detailed, scholarly, packed with great tales and interesting speculations, The Boggart is a groundbreaking study that rescues and re-establishes the scary boggart of the 19th century. -- Katherine Langrish * Gramarye * ...a highly informative monograph on the 'boggart'...this book sets a benchmark. -- Ian Shiels, Northern History ...one would have to struggle to find a comparative analysis of a supernatural being or myth/folklore-related creature that can be compared to the depth and detail presented in the work done by Simon Young. Young's research successfully manages to empirically outline a myth by tracing the historical, linguistic, and cultural development of a phenomenon. -- Marko Lukic, Oral History Society The Boggart is a brilliant piece of scholarship that brings to life, through a wide-range of research material, the essence of what lurked in the shadows of society. -- Nigel Watson, Fortean Times The Boggart is well written, with light touches of humor that make this a compelling and enjoyable read. Given both this and the quality of the research underlying it, the book represents a stellar study of British popular belief that should be seen as an exemplar for future works on similar topics...The Boggart is folklore history at its best, a book that deserves a very wide readership. -- Ethan Doyle White, Reading Religion This comprehensive and groundbreaking study will be essential reading for folklorists, historians, social scientists, and others interested in the world of the supernatural, not least in providing an outstanding model for innovative research in these and related fields. -- J. D. A. Widdowson, Tradition Today

The amount of focus, lateral thinking and sheer dogged research that has gone into this work is admirable dedication, and leavened by a light touch that makes it intensely readable throughout. -- John Billingsley * Northern Earth *

Author Information

Simon Young is a British folklore historian, based in Italy. He has a longstanding interest in the study of the supernatural. In 2017 he edited Magical Folk (2017) with Ceri Houlbrook, and has published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in Folk Life, Folklore, Gramarye, Supernatural Studies, Tradition Today and other journals.

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