Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about curses with help from scholars Natalie Underberg, Evangelos Gr. Avdikos, and others, discussing the use of curses in storytelling, and providing you with an example and a reflective writing exercise. If you're new to the newsletter or missed March's "What is a charm?" edition, do go back and read it before engaging with this one. Many folklore scholars agree that curses may be viewed as negative charms, and with that in mind, this discussion is an extension of the last one (Roper 2003a; 2003b; Ryan, Kapalo, and Pocs 2012).
Folkloric Discussion of Curses
Like charms, curses are expressions of folk belief and verbal lore. Moreover, Jonathan Roper's definition of charms also works for their negative counterparts. They are patterned traditional utterances performed in specific contexts, they are sometimes accompanied by gestures and accessories, and they are credited with the power to bring about changes in the health, fortune, safety, and emotional state of an individual or group (Roper 2003b, 8). With these similarities on board, we can begin to look at curses a bit more closely.
Natalie Underberg identifies and discusses several curse motifs in folklore and literature, including:
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