Folkbyte June 2026

Greetings, and mòran taing for taking the time to read my newsletter. This is the June 2026 edition of Folkbyte, and it comes to you a week in advance of my departure for Iceland and the ISFNR conference in Reykjavik. Iceland always captivates me long before my feet hit the ground there, and this time I'll also be travelling north to Ásbyrgi Canyon again for the first time in nine years. So part of me is already, inevitably gone as I write these words.

Dispatches from the Word Mines

I'm nearly finished writing the "Superstition" chapter of The Storyteller's Guide to Folklore. Folklorists understand the genre in a few distinct but overlapping ways, and I've included the most critical of these, but I couldn't cram everything I wanted into the chapter. So here's a bit of scholarship that hit the cutting floor:

An interesting angle of study is presented by J.M and N.W Poushinsky, who conducted participant observation of Nova Scotia lobster fishermen convinced that wearing anything but white woollen mittens to work in the winter was bad luck. Further research revealed that dyeing wool subjects it to considerable heat, which destroys the protective lanolin in the fibres. So the undyed, or white woollen mittens were warmer than their colourful counterparts. As a result, Poushinsky and Poushinsky concluded that sometimes "Superstition is a mechanism that regulates and preserves technological knowledge over time" even after "Actual knowledge of the technological basis for the superstitious belief has most likely been lost from the system.”^[1] In other words, sometimes superstitions are supernatural beliefs that have practical origins.

After I cut the paragraph, I found several examples of supernatural belief in an early issue of The Journal of American Folklore that might also have practical origins. Folklore scholars Fanny Bergen and William Wells Newell group them under superstitions related to the motion of the sun, but I see practical wisdom here too:

• 1142. If you wish to secure lightness, you must always stir cake and eggs a certain way, that is, the way the sun goes.
• 1144. To make cake light, it must always be stirred the same way.
• 1145. In cooking soft custard, the stirring must be continued throughout in the direction in which it was begun; otherwise the custard will turn to whey.
• 1147. Ice cream will not freeze rightly unless the crank is turned the right way.
• 1149. In melting sugar for taffy, stir always one way, or it will grain.^[2]

There are Scottish supernatural beliefs around stirring food as well; specifically, that it should always be stirred deosil (sunwise). So again, I see the same grouping Bergen and Newell do, but I also see a folklore of foodways that encourages attentiveness to cake, custard, ice cream, and taffy, which all need to be watched for various reasons (e.g. over-mixing a cake can over-develop the gluten in the flour). To use this folklore of superstition in storytelling, you only need to develop practical instructions around religious or secular life in your story world, age them a bit (these superstitions were already old in 1896) and then provide supernatural reasons for these instructions that relate to some other element of your story world. (E.g. Building a planet with two moons? Which one of them offers good luck to the farmer who plants her tubers under it, and what is the practical reason for that good luck?)

This would have been a great little chunk of writing for the book, but alas, it draws attention away from more important discussions of superstition in storytelling. I hope it's useful to you, though!

This Month on Social Media

Subscribers will have received the May Special Dispatch titled "Imagining the Past," which is a meditation upon imagined pasts, cultural transmission, and their relationships to folklore. My new short video for May is titled "Climate Fiction Methods: Making a Point Without Preaching," and it's essentially a riff on some of the themes I'm discussing in my ISFNR paper. I do hope to make more of those though, when I come back from the conference. I'm really looking forward to learning what other folklore scholars have to say about nature and narrative.

Final Thoughts

Remember that you won't hear from me again this month, but because we'll cross Midsummer/Midwinter together (depending upon your hemisphere), I thought I'd leave you with a bit of The Bard.

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended--
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearnèd luck
Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long.
Else the Puck a liar call.
So good night unto you all.
Give me your hands if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.^[3]

Beannachdan,
Ceallaigh

Footnotes