Importance not in the details, but the in the message, speaker says

Accuracy in detail is not the important part of truth when it comes to story-telling, said William Wilson in his lecture Thursday in the Logan Tabernacle.

“What’s true in Mormon folklore?” Wilson asked the audience of about 300. “The answer, of course, is all of it.”

The speech was the thirteenth annual Leonard J. Arrington Mormon history lecture. Wilson was the first folklorist invited to talk, the most recent speaker following a line of 12 historians.

Wilson, professer emeritus of humanities at BYU, said his goal in his speech was to correct two misconceptions about folklore. He defined folklore as the part of culture transmitted over time and from place to place not as formal curriculum but as stories and legends of the past.

The first misconception he addressed was that folklore is kept and perpetuated only by simple, unlettered people.

“Who are the folk, then?” he said. “We are. All of us in this room. We transmit folklore because we are human beings dealing with human problems.”

Wilson said those who believe folklore is for the superstitious and old miss the folklore around them.

The second misconception, Wilson said, is that folklore only deals with old things and long-ago times.

Wilson said folklore is how a group of people expresses its values. Stories change with time to emphasize what is important to the community. They often migrate from place to place and even spin off new tales, Wilson said.

“Folklore gives an accurate picture of what people believe to be true,” he said, “it doesn’t necessarily have a precise depiction of things that happened. More often than not there will be a disconnect between what happened and what people believe to be true.”

Mormon folklore in recent times generally cluster around three themes: missionary work, family geneology and welfare, Wilson said. Mormons especially love to tell stories about divine intervention and messages from beyond the grave, he said. Over the years, Wilson and his students have gathered about 1,500 versions of stories about the three Nephites, figures from the Book of Mormon members of the LDS church believe to still be walking the earth, doing God’s will.

Many versions of this stories include missionaries being protected from violence or accidents, or people receiving help from a stranger who said little and disappeared before he could be thanked.

Wilson told a story about a pioneer woman traveling across the plains alone with her children when they broke a wheel. Were it not for a mysterious stranger – presumably one of the legendary three Nephites – who helped fix the wheel, they would have been stuck.

Then he told another version of the story, which included a car and a flat tire.

The important part of the stories, Wilson said, was not the details. Both stories had the same message that divine help is available to those who need it.

“Legends reveal the significance of events,” he said. Individuals learn how to see, act, respond and behave themselves according to the folklore told by in family and community.

“Folklore mirrors the culture of the people that possess it,” Wilson said. “In other words, what is in the culture is in the folklore.”

Folklore can also reveal people’s prejudices and negative sides, such as a story based in the 19th century about a cocky, abusive Indian and a brave Mormon girl who defended herself by running one of his braids through a wringer.

“Folklore can give off the impression that Mormonism is a self-centered religion whose members are only concerned with what God can do for them,” Wilson said. “Or the dramatic tales of divine intervention can be seen as behavioral models to tell people to help others as they have been helped.”

The stories’ most important messages are that if such great things could happen then the underlying principles such as missionary work must be true and important.

“For Mormons striving to live their religion these are central,” Wilson said.

After all, he said, the last misconception about folklore is that it’s not true.

-elizabeth.lawyer@aggiemail.usu.edu