Abstract
English Folk-Dances. Miss Maud Karpeles has published in Folk-Lore, vol. 43, No. 2, a study of the survival and revival of folk-dances, in which she reviews the principal types of folk-dance with special reference to the study of their meaning as a borderline province for the folk-dancer and the folk-lorist. The sword dance, which has survived in Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Durham, is danced by five men, or in Yorkshire by six or eight men, usually accompanied by additional characters, the ‘fool’, the ‘king’, ‘queen’ and ‘Bessie’. The sword in Yorkshire has a wooden handle at one end but in Durham is a piece of flexible steel with a handle at each end. In the climax of the dance the swords are woven into a ‘lock’ ‘nut’ ‘rose’ or ‘glass’ and one character suffers a mimic decapitation. There are several features in the dance as it was sometimes performed which point to a play from which it has become detached. Fragments of the play have been noted and, like the mummer's play, it is evidently of a ritual character, a fertility rite of which an animal sacrifice once formed part. The other main type of spectacular dance is the morris, for the name of which the best derivation up to the present seems to be ‘‘Moorish as referring to the blackened faces of the dancers in earlier times, of which traces survive in a smudge of black worn by some dancers in recent times. The morris may be an offshoot of the sword dance. There is, however, no trace of the sacrificial victim, though there are signs of a sacrificial or sacramental rite which are not embodied in the dance itself. It may be a processional lustration dance in which the stationary dance at certain spots has been elaborated at the expense of the processional.
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Research Items. Nature 130, 208–210 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130208a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130208a0