Taylor, Archer (1890–1973). Encyclopedia Of American Folklore

One of the greatest folklorists of his generation. His scholarship enriched two disciplines,
German and folklore. Taylor’s bibliography dirough 1960 consists of nearly 500 items
(Hand and Arlt 1960:356–374), many of them authoritative works of compilation and
classification of various genres of folklore. His classification system for formula tales
(see Taylor 1972:369–394) was adopted in Stith Thompson’s 1961 revision of The Types
of the Folktale. Taylor wrote historic-geographic studies of folktales, including The Black
Ox (1927) and “The Predestined Wife” (Taylor 1972:395–492), and of a ballad, Edward and Sven i Rosengaard (1931) (see also Taylor 1929). His favorite folklore genre was the
proverb, on which subject he published more than 100 articles, reviews, and books,
including The Proverb ([1931; index 1934] 1962). Many articles and several books on
riddles culminated in English Riddles from Oral Tradition (1961), which provides
comparative notes from all over the world.
While Taylor is usually described as a comparativist and not as an Americanist, he
made both major and minor contributions to the study of American folklore. In addition
to his English Riddles (with its Anglo American material), his notes on English and
American riddle tales were the basis of a sequel, Roger D.Abrahams’ Between the Living
and the Dead (1980, FFC 225). Taylor collected oral proverbs in Proverbial
Comparisons and Similes from California (1954) and literary ones, with B.J.Whiting, in
American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820–1880 (1958). A technique he used in
many of his articles was to give an American example of a traditional item and then
explain its peculiarities by displaying its European antecedents. Many of his short notes
comment on or ask for more information about purely American folklore (see Taylor
1947, 1959).
Taylor was educated at Swarthmore College and received his Ph.D. in German in 1915
from Harvard University, where he studied with many distinguished scholars, including
George Lyman Kittredge (thus Taylor was part of the scholarly tradition of ballad scholar
Francis James Child). In 1939 he became professor of German at the University of
California, Berkeley, where he remained until his retirement in 1958. He was largely
responsible for founding the California Folklore Society (Cattermole-Tally 1989), and he
edited its journal, California Folklore Quarterly (later Western Folklore), from its
inception in 1942 through 1954. He also edited Proverbium from 1965 until 1973.
Early in his career, Taylor cultivated European contacts, which led to the entry of
European ideas, including exhaustive citations of parallels and the historic-geographic
method, into American folklore scholarship. As evidenced in his incisive, sometimes
caustic book reviews, he insisted on high stan-dards in folklore scholarship. To Taylor
folklore was the material that is handed on by tradition, either by word of mouth or by
custom and practice, and, furthermore, “comparison is an essential and typical method in
folklore” (Taylor 1964:116). He envisioned collections and indexes as tools that should
be used to construct a firm foundation that would ultimately support the study of “the
historical, social-historical, literary-historical, cultural, psychological, and
methodological implications” (Taylor 1964:121) of the subject under scrutiny.
Christine Goldberg
References
Cattermole-Tally, Frances. 1989. From Proverb to Belief and Superstition: An Encyclopedic
Vision. Western Folklore 48:3–14.
Hand, Wayland D. 1974. Archer Taylor, 1890–1973. Journal of American Folklore 87:2–9.
Hand, Wayland D., and Gustav O.Arlt, eds. 1960. Humaniora: Essays in Literature, Folklore, and
Bibliography Honoring Archer Taylor on His Seventieth Birthday. Locust Valley, NY:
J.J.Augustin.
Taylor, Archer. 1929. The English, Scottish, and American Versions of “The Twa Sisters.” Journal
of American Folklore 42:238–246.
——. 1947. Pedro! Pedro! Western Folklore 6:228–231.
——. 1959. One for the Cutworm. Western Folklore 17:52–53.
——. 1964. The Classics of Folklore. Arv 20:113–124. Reprinted in Comparative Studies in
Folklore. Taiper: Orient Cultural Service, 1972, pp. 9–20.
——. 1972. Comparative Studies in Folklore. Taipei: Orient Cultural Service.

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