I am saddened to report the passing of folklorist W. F. H. "Bill" Nicolaisen (born June 13, 1927 in Halle/Saale, Germany), distinguished professor emeritus at Binghamton University (USA) and honorary research professor at the University of Aberdeen, on February 14, 2016 in Aberdeen, Scotland. Nicolaisen was renowned for his folkloristic studies of names, narratives, ballads, and literature. He covered European and American folklore broadly and was especially involved in Scottish studies. He was a leader of the discipline, including serving as president of the American Folklore Society and the Folklore Society (UK), the only person to date to have been in both positions. He was the first recipient of the American Folklore Society lifetime scholarly achievement award. Publication of a volume of his papers on folklore was in progress at the time of his death and will be seen to completion by his colleagues at Aberdeen.
Bill Nicolaisen was born Wilhelm Fritz Hermann Nicolaisen on June 13, 1927, in Halle/Saale, in east-central Germany, near Leipzig. His father was a professor of agriculture at the University of Kiel and his mother was a librarian there. He attended the University of Kiel in Germany from 1948 to 1950 where he studied folklore, language, and literature. In 1950 he attended the King's College, Newcastle upon Tyne, now the University of Newcastle in England. He returned to Germany to study at the University Tuebingen, where he received his Dr. Phil. magna cum laude in comparative linguistics, English, and German in 1955. Among his professors were renowned folklorists Kurt Ranke and Walter Anderson. Having been awarded a "Scholarship for Advanced Studies in Arts" from the University of Glasgow, he later received Bachelor and Master of Letters degrees (1956, 1970) in Celtic Studies. His dissertation in Germany had been on the river names of the British Isles ("Die morphologisch und semasiologische Struktur der Gewassernamen der britischen Inseln") and in Glasgow, he focused on Scottish river names ("Studies in Scottish Hydronymy").
At universities in Glasgow and Dublin Nicolaisen taught German language and literature and from 1956 to 1969 he worked in the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh as head of the Scottish Place-Name Survey. He had research interests in language (particularly place names), in folklore (narrative and balladry), in literature (medieval classics and Scottish poets and novelists), and in cultural history (Scotland, the British Isles, and Scandinavia). In the fall of 1966, Nicolaisen came to Ohio State University in the United States as visiting professor of English and folklore. In 1967, he returned to the University of Edinburgh, becoming the acting head of its School of Scottish Studies in 1968. The following year, he left for the United States to take the position of associate professor in the English Department at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He rose to the university's highest honor of distinguished professor. He later took visiting professor posts at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His books and papers were donated to the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen.
Scholarship
Nicolaisen's first publications, beginning in 1957, were on place names. To show their relations in time and space and their cultural connections to the views of ethnic communities through history, he collected narratives attached to them. His work culminated almost twenty years later in Scottish Place Names, a monumental volume that won the Chicago Folklore Prize for outstanding contribution to folklore studies. His output of over 600 journal articles and essays built on this foundation to move into narrative studies, including research on legend, ballad, folktale, jokes, personal experience narrative, and literature. In his narrative studies, Nicolaisen repeatedly examined the linguistic structures that guide formation into narrative. Overall, he insisted that the materials of tradition were creative rather than static. He defined the relationship between creativity and tradition as basic to the process of folklore; he viewed them in tension, not in contradiction.
"Names and Narratives," the title of his presidential address to the American Folklore Society in 1983, presented major theoretical questions regarding the processes by which traditional expressions are created and spread. Nicolaisen suggested regarding folkness not in terms of societal status but as an appropriate behavioral response to the stimulus of certain circumstances—a "cultural register rather than a cultural level." As a student of linguistics, Nicolaisen recognized register as a reference to a form of language appropriate to a limited situation. Together with the linguistically derived idea that textual structures and variable situations guide the nature of expression, the act—or art—of storytelling largely informs Nicolaisen's viewpoint. Nicolaisen recognized that narratives breed variation because they are reconstituted in performance, although their integrity as stories is maintained. They are, in his words, "the inevitable and necessary result of social interaction, of the need to narrate oneself and each other in never-ending fictions" (1991: 10).
Nicolaisen was active in linking geography to the study of folklore and language, and was one of the founders of the Society for North American Cultural Survey to promote work in the field. Nicolaisen was an advocate for mapping folk culture in America as an applied form of folklore study so as to visualize the ways that people "make regions." Nicolaisen insisted that the geographic approach has a profound implication for folklore studies. This approach suggests folk culture as a whole with registers, isoglosses, and dialects. His goal, he stated in essays such as "Variant, Dialect, and Region" for the journal New York Folklore with which he was associated for many years, was of achieving a geography of tradition that could lead to a geography of the human mind.
Awards and Honors
Nicolaisen is the only folklorist to have been president of both the American Folklore Society and the Folklore Society (Great Britain). He also served as president of the American Name Society and New York Folklore Society, in addition to being its editor. In 1992, he was presented a festschrift Creativity and Tradition in Folklore edited by Simon J. Bronner, and containing seventeen studies under the headings of ballad and song, narrative, language and cultural knowledge, and community and identity. In 2002, he was the first recipient of the American Folklore Society's lifetime scholarly achievement award. In 2006, he was celebrated by his adopted country of Scotland with an honorary degree at the University of Aberdeen. Other prizes for his lifetime scholarly achievement included the Salhgren Prize, the highest award given by the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture. A prize given by the Scottish Place-Name Society for the best student essay bears Nicolaisen’s name. Across the Atlantic, further recognition came in the form of an award named after him in literary onomastics for the author of the best essay in the Journal of Literary Onomastics.
Books and Major Articles
1961. "Field-Work in Place-Name Research." Studia Hibernica 1: 74-88.
(ed.) 1968. Transactions of the Third International Congress of Celtic Studies. Edinburgh.
1970 (with M. Gelling and M. Richards). The Names of Towns and Cities in Britain. London: B.T. Batsford.
1970. "Gaelic Place-Names in Southern Scotland." Studia Celtica 5:15-35.
1972. "Onomastics--An Independent Discipline?" Indiana Names 3:33-47.
1973. "Folklore and Geography: Towards an Atlas of American Folk Culture." New York Folklore Quarterly 29:3-20.
1973. "Place-Names in Traditional Ballads." Folklore 84:299-312.
1975. "Place Names in Bilingual Communities." Names 23:167-74.
1976. Scottish Place-Names. London: B.T. Batsford.
1976. "Folk and Habitat." Studia Fennica 20:324-30.
1978. "The Folk and the Region." New York Folklore 2:143-49.
1978. "English Jack and American Jack" Midwestern Journal of Language and Folklore 4:27-36.
1978. "How Incremental is Incremental Repetition?" In Patricia Congroy, ed., Ballads and Ballad Research, 122-33. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
1980. "Variant, Dialect and Region: An Exploration in the Geography of Tradition." New York Folklore 6:137-49.
1980. "Space in Folk Narrative." In Nikolai Burlakoff and Carl Lindahl, eds., Folklore on Two Contnents: Essays in Honor of Linda Degh., 14-18. Bloomington, Indiana: Trickster Press.
1980. "Time in Folk Narrative." In Venetia Newall, ed., Folklore Studies in the Twentieth Century. 314-19. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer.
1980. "What is Your Name? The Question of Identity in Some of the Waverley Novels." Names 28:255-66.
1983. "Folklore and...What?" New York Folklore 9:89-98.
1984. "Names and Narratives." Journal of American Folklore 97:259-72.
1984. "Legends as Narrative Response." In Paul Smith, ed. Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, 167-78. Sheffield: University of Sheffield.
1987. "The Linguistic Structure of Legends." In Gillian Bennett et al., eds. Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, vol. II, 61-67. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
1989. "Kurt Ranke and Einfache Formen." Folklore 100:113-19.
1990. "Why Tell Stories?" Fabula 13:5-10.
1990. "Maps of Fiction: The Cartography of the Landscape of the Mind." Onomastic Canadiana 72:57-68.
1991. "The Past as Place: Names, Stories, and the Remembered Self." Folklore 102:3-15.
1992 "Humour in Traditional Ballads." Folklore 103: 27-39
1994 "The Teller and teh Tale: Storytelling on Beech Mountain." In William McCarthy, ed. Jack in Two
Worlds. University of North Carolina Press.
1994 "The Proverbial Scot." Proverbium 11: 197-206
1996 "Legends as Narrative Response." in Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, eds. Contemporary Legend. Garland.
2003 "Presidential Preferences." Folklore 114: 1-12.
2005 "Manly Characters in Contemporary Legends." In Simon J. Bronner, ed., Manly traditions. Indiana
University Press.
2008 "Time and Place" In Donald Haase, ed. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folkatles and Fairy Tales.
Greenwood Press.
2008 "Conemporary Legends in der englischsprachigen Presse: Moderne Sagen als Zeitungsnachritcht." In
Christoph Schmitt, ed. Erzaehlkulturen im Medienwandel. Waxmann.
2011. In the Beginning was the Name. Scottish Place Name Society.
2013. The Ballad and the Folklorist (edited with James Moreira). Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Simon J. Bronner
The Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg
Bill Nicolaisen was born Wilhelm Fritz Hermann Nicolaisen on June 13, 1927, in Halle/Saale, in east-central Germany, near Leipzig. His father was a professor of agriculture at the University of Kiel and his mother was a librarian there. He attended the University of Kiel in Germany from 1948 to 1950 where he studied folklore, language, and literature. In 1950 he attended the King's College, Newcastle upon Tyne, now the University of Newcastle in England. He returned to Germany to study at the University Tuebingen, where he received his Dr. Phil. magna cum laude in comparative linguistics, English, and German in 1955. Among his professors were renowned folklorists Kurt Ranke and Walter Anderson. Having been awarded a "Scholarship for Advanced Studies in Arts" from the University of Glasgow, he later received Bachelor and Master of Letters degrees (1956, 1970) in Celtic Studies. His dissertation in Germany had been on the river names of the British Isles ("Die morphologisch und semasiologische Struktur der Gewassernamen der britischen Inseln") and in Glasgow, he focused on Scottish river names ("Studies in Scottish Hydronymy").
At universities in Glasgow and Dublin Nicolaisen taught German language and literature and from 1956 to 1969 he worked in the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh as head of the Scottish Place-Name Survey. He had research interests in language (particularly place names), in folklore (narrative and balladry), in literature (medieval classics and Scottish poets and novelists), and in cultural history (Scotland, the British Isles, and Scandinavia). In the fall of 1966, Nicolaisen came to Ohio State University in the United States as visiting professor of English and folklore. In 1967, he returned to the University of Edinburgh, becoming the acting head of its School of Scottish Studies in 1968. The following year, he left for the United States to take the position of associate professor in the English Department at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He rose to the university's highest honor of distinguished professor. He later took visiting professor posts at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His books and papers were donated to the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen.
Scholarship
Nicolaisen's first publications, beginning in 1957, were on place names. To show their relations in time and space and their cultural connections to the views of ethnic communities through history, he collected narratives attached to them. His work culminated almost twenty years later in Scottish Place Names, a monumental volume that won the Chicago Folklore Prize for outstanding contribution to folklore studies. His output of over 600 journal articles and essays built on this foundation to move into narrative studies, including research on legend, ballad, folktale, jokes, personal experience narrative, and literature. In his narrative studies, Nicolaisen repeatedly examined the linguistic structures that guide formation into narrative. Overall, he insisted that the materials of tradition were creative rather than static. He defined the relationship between creativity and tradition as basic to the process of folklore; he viewed them in tension, not in contradiction.
"Names and Narratives," the title of his presidential address to the American Folklore Society in 1983, presented major theoretical questions regarding the processes by which traditional expressions are created and spread. Nicolaisen suggested regarding folkness not in terms of societal status but as an appropriate behavioral response to the stimulus of certain circumstances—a "cultural register rather than a cultural level." As a student of linguistics, Nicolaisen recognized register as a reference to a form of language appropriate to a limited situation. Together with the linguistically derived idea that textual structures and variable situations guide the nature of expression, the act—or art—of storytelling largely informs Nicolaisen's viewpoint. Nicolaisen recognized that narratives breed variation because they are reconstituted in performance, although their integrity as stories is maintained. They are, in his words, "the inevitable and necessary result of social interaction, of the need to narrate oneself and each other in never-ending fictions" (1991: 10).
Nicolaisen was active in linking geography to the study of folklore and language, and was one of the founders of the Society for North American Cultural Survey to promote work in the field. Nicolaisen was an advocate for mapping folk culture in America as an applied form of folklore study so as to visualize the ways that people "make regions." Nicolaisen insisted that the geographic approach has a profound implication for folklore studies. This approach suggests folk culture as a whole with registers, isoglosses, and dialects. His goal, he stated in essays such as "Variant, Dialect, and Region" for the journal New York Folklore with which he was associated for many years, was of achieving a geography of tradition that could lead to a geography of the human mind.
Awards and Honors
Nicolaisen is the only folklorist to have been president of both the American Folklore Society and the Folklore Society (Great Britain). He also served as president of the American Name Society and New York Folklore Society, in addition to being its editor. In 1992, he was presented a festschrift Creativity and Tradition in Folklore edited by Simon J. Bronner, and containing seventeen studies under the headings of ballad and song, narrative, language and cultural knowledge, and community and identity. In 2002, he was the first recipient of the American Folklore Society's lifetime scholarly achievement award. In 2006, he was celebrated by his adopted country of Scotland with an honorary degree at the University of Aberdeen. Other prizes for his lifetime scholarly achievement included the Salhgren Prize, the highest award given by the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture. A prize given by the Scottish Place-Name Society for the best student essay bears Nicolaisen’s name. Across the Atlantic, further recognition came in the form of an award named after him in literary onomastics for the author of the best essay in the Journal of Literary Onomastics.
Books and Major Articles
1961. "Field-Work in Place-Name Research." Studia Hibernica 1: 74-88.
(ed.) 1968. Transactions of the Third International Congress of Celtic Studies. Edinburgh.
1970 (with M. Gelling and M. Richards). The Names of Towns and Cities in Britain. London: B.T. Batsford.
1970. "Gaelic Place-Names in Southern Scotland." Studia Celtica 5:15-35.
1972. "Onomastics--An Independent Discipline?" Indiana Names 3:33-47.
1973. "Folklore and Geography: Towards an Atlas of American Folk Culture." New York Folklore Quarterly 29:3-20.
1973. "Place-Names in Traditional Ballads." Folklore 84:299-312.
1975. "Place Names in Bilingual Communities." Names 23:167-74.
1976. Scottish Place-Names. London: B.T. Batsford.
1976. "Folk and Habitat." Studia Fennica 20:324-30.
1978. "The Folk and the Region." New York Folklore 2:143-49.
1978. "English Jack and American Jack" Midwestern Journal of Language and Folklore 4:27-36.
1978. "How Incremental is Incremental Repetition?" In Patricia Congroy, ed., Ballads and Ballad Research, 122-33. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
1980. "Variant, Dialect and Region: An Exploration in the Geography of Tradition." New York Folklore 6:137-49.
1980. "Space in Folk Narrative." In Nikolai Burlakoff and Carl Lindahl, eds., Folklore on Two Contnents: Essays in Honor of Linda Degh., 14-18. Bloomington, Indiana: Trickster Press.
1980. "Time in Folk Narrative." In Venetia Newall, ed., Folklore Studies in the Twentieth Century. 314-19. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer.
1980. "What is Your Name? The Question of Identity in Some of the Waverley Novels." Names 28:255-66.
1983. "Folklore and...What?" New York Folklore 9:89-98.
1984. "Names and Narratives." Journal of American Folklore 97:259-72.
1984. "Legends as Narrative Response." In Paul Smith, ed. Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, 167-78. Sheffield: University of Sheffield.
1987. "The Linguistic Structure of Legends." In Gillian Bennett et al., eds. Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, vol. II, 61-67. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
1989. "Kurt Ranke and Einfache Formen." Folklore 100:113-19.
1990. "Why Tell Stories?" Fabula 13:5-10.
1990. "Maps of Fiction: The Cartography of the Landscape of the Mind." Onomastic Canadiana 72:57-68.
1991. "The Past as Place: Names, Stories, and the Remembered Self." Folklore 102:3-15.
1992 "Humour in Traditional Ballads." Folklore 103: 27-39
1994 "The Teller and teh Tale: Storytelling on Beech Mountain." In William McCarthy, ed. Jack in Two
Worlds. University of North Carolina Press.
1994 "The Proverbial Scot." Proverbium 11: 197-206
1996 "Legends as Narrative Response." in Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, eds. Contemporary Legend. Garland.
2003 "Presidential Preferences." Folklore 114: 1-12.
2005 "Manly Characters in Contemporary Legends." In Simon J. Bronner, ed., Manly traditions. Indiana
University Press.
2008 "Time and Place" In Donald Haase, ed. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folkatles and Fairy Tales.
Greenwood Press.
2008 "Conemporary Legends in der englischsprachigen Presse: Moderne Sagen als Zeitungsnachritcht." In
Christoph Schmitt, ed. Erzaehlkulturen im Medienwandel. Waxmann.
2011. In the Beginning was the Name. Scottish Place Name Society.
2013. The Ballad and the Folklorist (edited with James Moreira). Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Simon J. Bronner
The Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg
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