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Recently many of us had the pleasure of gathering at a book launch for two publications: Little Jack and Other Newfoundland Folktales, edited by John Widdowson and Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture by Holly Everett. For your reading and viewing pleasure, here are excerpts from each book. (From the introduction to Little Jack and other Newfoundland Folktales, ed. John Widdowson. St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Publications, 2002.) Because of their rarity in still being part of the oral tradition of adult English-speaking storytellers in the second half of the twentieth century, these folktales were singled out for particular attention. In 1976, Herbert Halpert and I began the transcription, editing and annotating of 150 of the tales collected in the province mainly in the years 1964-1979. Twenty years later the collection was published as Folktales of Newfoundland (1996). The transcriptions aimed to set down on paper the exact words of the storytellers. The detailed notes in Folktales of Newfoundland were intended mainly for academic readers but, as we always also intended, the present volume makes many of the stories available to the general reader, and allows us to give back to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador a selection of the tales that they so generously shared with the collectors over the years. The fifty folktales in this selection were all originally recorded on tape. Following principles adopted in Folktales of Newfoundland (1996), the tales in the present volume are transcribed as closely as possible to the original recorded performance. The intention is to present the stories in an accessible way to readers, with minimal disturbance of the original storytelling, and so preserving as far as possible the storyteller’s actual words, individual voice and style, in order that readers will be able to “hear” the living speech which identifies the stories with the various parts of the province where they were told. (From Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture, by Holly Everett. Denton, TX: U of North Texas P, 2002.) Like most residents of my hometown, Austin, Texas, I took roadside crosses for granted. When I first became conscious of them, as a teenage driver, I thought of them as grim warnings. I did not know then that the crosses had a long history in Mexico and the southwestern United States, nor that they had analogues in several other countries. I had no firsthand knowledge of the construction of those I drove past almost daily. Nonetheless, I found them fascinating and disturbing. The communicative process of roadside crosses, as tangible evidence of extremely personal pain, inevitably affects an entire community. As centerpieces of fragile, dynamic memorial assemblages, such crosses are only now being examined as more than incidental specks in the cultural landscape of certain groups. A unique form of public, belief-centered material culture, roadside accident markers occupy a rare space not only in the realm of roadside attractions, but in the ongoing cognitive map of the individual, a uniqueness that renders them extra-legal, or “outlaw” and almost untouchable markers of liminal space. They represent the continuation and adaptation of one of the oldest forms of memorial culture. (1)
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