Folk Life

Folk Life covers the everyday material of European cultures — the calendar customs and seasonal feasts, the household crafts of textile and woodwork, the regional cuisines, the folk music and dance traditions, the oral storytelling and proverb literature, the family and village rituals that have been carried forward from generation to generation without much help from institutions.

We cover this material because it is where the European traditions actually live for most people, most of the time. The Norse saga belongs to the literary record; the midsummer bonfire belongs to the village calendar. Both are heritage. We write about folk traditions with the same seriousness we give to high culture — and we resist the common temptation to treat folk material as either quaint or politically charged. Most of it is neither.