Introducing… Dr Ceri Houlbrook

In our Introducing… posts, we’ll tell you a little more about the team behind the National Folklore Survey for England, and how they came to research folklore.

Here you can find out more about Dr Ceri Houlbrook, Senior Lecturer in Folklore and History at the University of Hertfordshire.

Your PhD thesis was about the coin tree in Britain, which you later published as The Roots of a Ritual: The magic of coin-trees from religion to recreation. When did you first discover the coin tree? What was it about the phenomena that interested you?

I can quite vividly remember when I first discovered the coin tree: it was at Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire and I was about ten years old, going on a muddy riverside walk with my family. I saw a vast log stretched out beside the footpath, bristling with coins, and my sister and I asked if we could add our own. Our parents obliged, fishing in their pockets for pennies, and we made our contributions. I can’t remember whether we assigned it any purpose, and if I wished for something I don’t recall what (although I had a crush on the Green Power Ranger at the time so maybe the wish had something to do with him). I didn’t think too much about the coin tree after that encounter, but over a decade later when I was exploring contemporary ritual practices for a PhD topic, the image of that coin-encrusted log came back to me. I’d assumed it was unique to Bolton Abbey, but some research revealed that it was much more widespread and was the modern-day amalgamation of centuries-old practices. I was fascinated by the various strands of beliefs, customs, and trends that had led to a contemporary ritual I’d participated in years before I even knew the word ‘folklore’.

You’ve also published extensively on the love-lock (when people engrave their names on a padlock and lock it in a public place, often on bridges). What does the love-lock say about contemporary society, do you think?

It says that love is in the air, all around, and all you need. I’m not being glib – that is the most obvious thing love-locks say about society. For every engraved padlock hanging on a bridge, there’s a story of love behind it, often romantic but sometimes also for family or friends. Stories of travel, of relationship milestones reached, of birthdays celebrated, of lost loved ones remembered. The love-lock tells us, quite simply, that we love. It also tells us that we have a fondness for public ritual and a propensity for embellishing our landscapes with small acts of personalization. It tells us that there is something universally potent about the symbolism of padlocks, with love-locks appearing on every continent worldwide (bar Antarctica, although I’d love to be proved wrong on that). It tells us that a custom can spread rapidly and globally with enough representation in popular culture and social media (it was first popularized by an Italian teenage romance novel published in 2006). And it tells us how subjective ‘heritage’ and ‘value’ are, with so many people viewing love-locks as unsightly acts of vandalism. What is ugly litter to one person is a token of love to another.

Ceri Houlbook and the love-lock, a worldwide phenemenon (the love-lock, we mean, though Ceri’s work is certainly far-reaching!)

Congratulations on your recent publication, with Professor Owen Davies, Folklore: a journey through the past and present. This must have been a mammoth project to organise! How did you and Owen decide what you would cover in the book?

The hardest part was deciding what not to cover. We would have happily written a book four times the length so that we could include everything we wanted, but we were subject to a word limit, hence had to make some tough decisions. Our main priority with Folklore: a journey through the past and present was to demonstrate the ubiquity of folklore, how it impacts us all in our everyday lives – often without us identifying it as ‘folklore’ – and how it has always adapted to changing times and has always represented the diversity of Britain. With these aims in mind, we designed our seven-section framework: coming together and taking part; stories; environment; spiritual life; intimate life; modern media; identity. Then it was a matter of deciding which elements of British folklore are so key they needed to be included but also to be problematized or cast in a new light (such as the ritual year, witchcraft, and King Arthur) and which elements we could make an original contribution to (some of our favourites were the folklore of the natural world and broadcasting folklore). Then we inevitably wrote far too many words and spent a horrible month culling, but once we’d overcome that challenge, what we were left with was something I’m incredibly proud of and hope people enjoy reading.

You are Programme Leader for the only Folklore Studies MA in England at the University of Hertfordshire. Why is it important that students have the opportunity to study folklore?

Folklore suffers from a reputation of frivolity, but there’s nothing more valuable than gaining an understanding of ourselves – and that’s exactly what studying folklore gives us. It provides unique insights into our diverse societies and cultures, past, present, and future. It shows us how we understand and engage with the world, and helps us to explore and question our national, communal, family, and personal values. Studying folklore also equips us with many valuable tools, from keen observation skills to communication skills that can bridge cultural differences. It instils in us a natural default mode of multidisciplinarity, preventing us from suffering from disciplinary blinders and allowing us to see the forest as well as the trees. And studying folklore also encourages us to value the (sadly underrated but incredibly important) personal qualities most people attracted to folklore already possess: curiosity, respect for others’ cultures, and an esteem for human creativity in its myriad forms.

You have also written a novel which has folklore research at its heart. Can you tell us more about this? Do you hope to write more folkloric fiction in the future?

I love writing things that make people feel as well as think. My first book was a stapled-together five-page manuscript about a young dragon who couldn’t breathe fire (I was seven and considered my work worthy of a Pulitzer) and I’ve been writing stories ever since. My academic work invariably feeds into my fiction writing, but Winter’s Wishfall was the first full length novel I wrote based on my folklore research. It wasn’t a conscious decision though. Delving into archives of letters written by children to Father Christmas it was impossible not to turn those precious documents of hopes, beliefs, and magic into a story. And given how much I enjoyed writing it, I’m certainly not going to stop!

Why were you keen to be involved in the National Folklore Survey for England project?

There’s a prevailing belief that folklore is something of the past, something belonging to a certain type of person, and something that needs to be preserved in crystallized form. The National Folklore Survey for England project promised to dispel this damaging misconception. The folkloric value of asking a truly representative sample of people in England (not just white, middle class ruralites) what beliefs they hold, what customs they practice, and what stories they share can’t be overstated. I knew before starting on the project that folklore is pervasive, diverse, and dynamic, and I was hoping the Survey would evidence that (spoiler: it does). What I hadn’t anticipated were the surprising results that speak of how many different factors, from age and gender to employment status, influence our personal and highly distinctive folkloric nexi.

Can you tell us about something you're working on now?

I’m writing two things simultaneously, which are inevitably feeding into each other. One is an academic trade book on folklore’s impact on the environment – both positive and negative – and the other is a piece of fiction in the genre of magical realism, but I can’t tell you more. After all, a wish spoken is a wish broken 😉

Dr Ceri Houlbrook, Senior Lecturer in Folklore and History, is the Programme Leader for the MA Folklore Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. Her primary interests are ritual practices, popular beliefs, and how they adapt to contemporary society. She has written three monographs (The Magic of Coin-Trees, Unlocking the Love-Lock, and Ritual 'Litter' Redressed), co-written two with Owen Davies (Building Magic and the upcoming British Folklore: A journey through the past and present), and co-edited several books and journal special issues. In addition to her scholarly work, she writes folklore-inspired fiction.