William Thoms (1803 – 1885) was an avid collector and publisher of English stories, starting with his three-volume book Early Prose Romances which included tales of Faustus and Robin Hood. This passion for storytelling made him well qualified to give a name to the traditional tale, and in 1846 he coined the word “folklore” in a letter to the Athenaeum literary magazine. He states that popular antiquities or popular literature “would be most aptly described by a good Saxon compound, folk-lore – the lore of the people”. The term encompasses fairy tales, ballads and traditions, often passed down orally between generations. By the time the genre was named, its most celebrated works had already been published. The Grimm Brothers published their first fairy tales for children in 1812, and today their collection of folk tales has been translated from their native German into more than 100 languages.
Many of our most popular and celebrated works of literature have been influenced by folklore. It has been argued that in the time of Shakespeare, most stage drama would be a combination of the author’s own work, dialogue improvised by actors and plot lines borrowed from folk tales. King Lear, in particular, borrows many of its plot points from tales well known around Europe.
William Thoms may have lacked the creative spark to make his own contribution to the genre, but he was not forgotten by lovers of folklore. In 1946, to mark the centenary of Thoms’ first use of the term, Duncan Emrich reminded the world of his importance in the California Folklore Quarterly: “We are folklorists only because of Thoms. And we might have been “demologists”, “mythographs”, “demopsychologists” or “anthropopsychologists”.
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