Folktales & memory with author Katherine Langrish
Do folktales contain memory? Does the odyssey or Iliad contain history? What is remembered and what is forgotten? Over all the event was an interesting talk and Q&A session. These were some of the questions that arose during an interesting talk given by Katherine Langrish at the University of Warwick on the 25th of January 2017. She began with a picture of Arthur’s stone, a grouping of stone described as being built by King Arthur, the place of his burial, or where one of his rivals was buried. We are after all a nation of storytellers where even the remotest stone emerging from the earth in Cornwall, becomes the bones of a long forgotten giant. But what “truths” are present in these fragments of stories we call folklore? Memory Langrish proposed is not just about the things our brain recites back to us but also contains a sense of who we are, our identity. Folklore then is a form of memory, and memory a form of folklore. Personal...