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Abstract
The literatures dealing with legends and vernacular narratives, on the one hand, and collective memory, on the other, are rarely brought to bear on each other. Following a discussion of the classificatory focus of the legend literature, and the lack of agreement about classification in that literature, this paper draws on the collective memory literature to suggest a focus on process. In particular, it suggests that we should pay attention to a historical process during which local reports of "known" people and happenings may be transformed, in the course of their incorporation into wider spheres of discourse, into legends, which may, through further chronological and spatial distancing from their original context, become fantasies. This tentative framework is used to analyse how the local reputation of Biddy Early, a well-known nineteenth-century "wise woman" of County Clare, Ireland, spread-originally through the work of Lady Gregory, in particular-to become first national, then international and, finally, in the age of the Internet, global. In the course of this long process, first-hand reports of her skills and powers eventually became transformed into free-floating marketing devices and New Age fantasies.
Introduction
Folklorists and anthropologists today tend not to approach vernacular narratives about the past as "traditional" accounts-albeit probably garbled over time-of what people did or thought then, but as evolving discourses that must be interpreted within contemporary local or ethnic cosmologies, the now of their telling (Handler and Linnekin 1984). This approach is fundamental to any nonreductionist understanding of folklore. We should not, however, forget that vernacular narratives of this kind have their own histories-as, indeed, may the people who figure in them-which have a bearing on their interpretation. Those histories, if they are knowable, are, in fact, crucial to the argument that creativity and re-invention are of the essence of "tradition." Vernacular narratives are thus simultaneously cosmological and historical, matters of belief and fact.
"Tradition" and Collective Memory
"Traditional" vernacular narratives have much in common with "collective memory" (Halbwachs 1992) and "popular culture." As Storey (2003) suggests, the genealogy of the modern conception of popular culture extends as far back as the discovery and description of "peasant customs and savage myths" (Dorson 1968) by antiquarians from the eighteenth century onward. What is more, Storey's subtitle-From Folklore to Globalization-reveals...