The Folklore Society (FLS) was founded in England in 1878 to study traditional vernacular culture, including traditional music, song, dance and drama, narrative, arts and crafts, customs and belief. The foundation was prompted by a suggestion made by Eliza Gutch in the pages of Notes and Queries.[1]
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William Thoms, the editor of Notes and Queries who had first introduced the term 'folk-lore', seems to have been instrumental in the formation of the society, and, along with G. L. Gomme, was for many years a leading member.[2]
Some prominent members were identified as the "great team" in Richard Dorson's now long outdated 1967 history of British folklore, late-Victorian leaders of the surge of intellectual interest in the field, these were Andrew Lang, Edwin Sidney Hartland, A. Nutt, William Alexander Clouston, Edward Clodd and Gomme. Later historians have taken a deeper interest in the pre-modern views of members such as Joseph Jacobs.[3] A long-serving member and steady contributor to the society's discourse and publications was Charlotte Sophia Burne, the first woman to become editor of its journal and later president (1909-10) of the Society.[4]
The society publishes, in partnership with Taylor and Francis, the journal Folklore in three issues per year, and since 1986 a newsletter, FLS News.
The Folklore Society Library has around 15,000 books and over 200 serial titles (40 currently received) and is held at University College London Library. Its major strengths are in folk narrative and British and Irish folklore; there are also substantial holdings of east European folklore books, and among the gems hard to find elsewhere are long runs of Estonian and Basque folklore serials. The Folklore Society Archives and Collections include folklore-related papers of G.L.Gomme and Lady Gomme, T.F.Ordish, William Crooke, Henry Underhill, Estella Canziani, George Galloway, Barbara Aitken, Margaret Murray, Katharine Briggs and others. The Society's archives and collections are held at University College London's Special Collections.
The Folklore Society office is at The Warburg Institute, where it keeps a small collection of reference books and essential finding aids, including the card catalogue of all FLS library accessions up to 1993 (all FLS accessions after 1993 have been added to University College London Library's online catalogue http://library.ucl.ac.uk Contact The Folklore Society Librarian via the society's website www.folklore-society.com for more information.
The journal began as the Folk-Lore Record in 1878, renamed Folk-Lore Journal, and from 1890 its issues were compiled as volumes entitled "Folk-Lore; A Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution, & Custom. Incorporating 'The Archæological Review' and 'The Folk-Lore Journal'".