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143-506: Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd (also spelled Madog ) was, according to folklore , a Welsh prince who sailed to the Americas in 1170, over three hundred years before Christopher Columbus 's voyage in 1492. According to the story, he was a son of Owain Gwynedd , and took to the sea to flee internecine violence at home. The "Madoc story" legend evidently evolved out of a medieval tradition about

286-541: A bloody dispute broke out between his heir, Hywel the Poet-Prince, and Owain's younger sons, Maelgwn , Rhodri , and led by Dafydd , two the children of the Princess-Dowager Cristen ferch Gronwy and one the child of Gwladus ferch Llywarch. Owain had at least 13 children from his two wives and several more children born out of wedlock but legally acknowledged under Welsh tradition. According to

429-463: A street culture outside the purview of adults. This is also ideal where it needs to be collected; as Iona and Peter Opie demonstrated in their pioneering book Children's Games in Street and Playground . Here the social group of children is studied on its own terms, not as a derivative of adult social groups. It is shown that the culture of children is quite distinctive; it is generally unnoticed by

572-707: A Myth , suggests that Cherokee tradition concerning that ruin may have been influenced by contemporary European-American legends of the " Welsh Indians ". A newspaper writer in Georgia, Walter Putnam, mentioned the Madoc legend in 2008. The story of Welsh explorers is one of several legends surrounding that site. In northeastern Alabama , there is a story that the "Welsh Caves" in DeSoto State Park were built by Madoc's party, since local native tribes were not known to have ever practised such stonework or excavation as

715-708: A Welsh explorer who landed on the shores of Mobile Bay in 1170 and left behind with the Indians the Welsh language. The plaque was removed by the Alabama Parks Service in 2008, either because of a hurricane or because the site focuses on the period from 1800 to 1945, and put in storage. It is now on display at the DAR headquarters in Mobile, Alabama . The plaque cited Sevier's claims about the "people called Welsh" and

858-721: A Welsh hero's sea voyage, to which only allusions survive. However, it attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era , when English and Welsh writers wrote of the claim that Madoc had come to the Americas as an assertion of prior discovery, and hence legal possession, of North America by the Kingdom of England . The Madoc story remained popular in later centuries, and a later development asserted that Madoc's voyagers had intermarried with local Native Americans, and that their Welsh-speaking descendants still live somewhere in

1001-432: A binary: one individual or group who actively transmits information in some form to another individual or group. Each of these is a defined role in the folklore process. The tradition-bearer is the individual who actively passes along the knowledge of an artifact; this can be either a mother singing a lullaby to her baby, or an Irish dance troupe performing at a local festival. They are named individuals, usually well known in

1144-408: A child's birthday party, including verbal lore ( Happy Birthday song ), material lore (presents and a birthday cake), special games ( Musical chairs ) and individual customs (making a wish as you blow out the candles). Each of these is a folklore artifact in its own right, potentially worthy of investigation and cultural analysis. Together they combine to build the custom of a birthday party celebration,

1287-489: A community. Many objects of material folklore are challenging to classify, difficult to archive, and unwieldy to store. The assigned task of museums is to preserve and make use of these bulky artifacts of material culture. To this end, the concept of the living museum has developed, beginning in Scandinavia at the end of the 19th century. These open-air museums not only display the artifacts, but also teach visitors how

1430-529: A continent in that southern part; full of animals and more populous than our Europe, or Asia, or Africa, and even more temperate and pleasant than any other region known to us. Vespucci's letter was a publishing sensation in Europe that was immediately and repeatedly reprinted in several other countries. Peter Martyr, who had been writing and circulating private letters commenting on Columbus's discoveries since 1493, often shares credit with Vespucci for designating

1573-516: A fishing net on a patron's behalf. Madog is referred to as "Splendid Madog ... / Of Owain Gwynedd's line, / He desired not land ... / Or worldly wealth but the sea." A Flemish writer called Willem, in around 1250 to 1255, identifies himself in his poem Van den Vos Reinaerde as " Willem die Madoc maecte " (Willem, the author of Madoc, known as "Willem the Minstrel"). Though no copies of Willem's "Madoc" survive, Gwyn Williams tells us that "In

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1716-593: A hoax". Thomas Jefferson had heard of Welsh-speaking Indian tribes. In a letter written to Meriwether Lewis by Jefferson on 22 January 1804, he speaks of searching for the Welsh Indians "said to be up the Missouri". The historian Stephen E. Ambrose writes in his history book Undaunted Courage that Thomas Jefferson believed the "Madoc story" to be true and instructed the Lewis and Clark Expedition to find

1859-584: A large open ocean between China on the east side of the map, and the inchoate largely water-surrounded North American and South American discoveries on the western side of map. Out of uncertainty, they depicted a finger of the Asian land mass stretching across the top to the eastern edge of the map, suggesting it carried over into the western hemisphere. E.g. the Cantino Planisphere denotes Greenland as "Punta d'Asia"—"edge of Asia". Some maps, e.g.,

2002-495: A nation as in American folklore or to a single family. " This expanded social definition of folk supports a broader view of the material, i.e., the lore, considered to be folklore artifacts . These now include all "things people make with words (verbal lore), things they make with their hands (material lore), and things they make with their actions (customary lore)". Folklore are no longer considered to be limited to that which

2145-436: A particular group frequently passed along by word of mouth. The concept of folk has varied over time. When Thoms first created this term, folk applied only to rural, frequently poor, and illiterate peasants. A more modern definition of folk is a social group that includes two or more people with common traits who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. "Folk is a flexible concept which can refer to

2288-620: A priority claim there. The 1584 Historie of Cambria by David Powel says that Madoc was disheartened by this family fighting, and that he and Rhirid set sail from Llandrillo ( Rhos-on-Sea ) in the cantref of Rhos to explore the western ocean. They purportedly discovered a distant and abundant land in 1170 where about one hundred men, women and children disembarked to form a colony. According to Humphrey Llwyd 's 1559 Cronica Walliae and in many other copied sources, Madoc and some others returned to Wales to recruit additional settlers. After gathering eleven ships and 120 men, women and children,

2431-516: A problem to be solved, but as a tremendous opportunity. In the diversity of American folklife, we find a marketplace teeming with the exchange of traditional forms and cultural ideas, a rich resource for Americans". This diversity is celebrated annually at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and many other folklife fests around the country. There are numerous other definitions. According to William Bascom major article on

2574-605: A scripted combination of multiple artifacts which have meaning within their social group. Folklorists divide customs into several different categories. A custom can be a seasonal celebration , such as Thanksgiving or New Year's . It can be a life cycle celebration for an individual, such as baptism, birthday or wedding. A custom can also mark a community festival or event; examples of this are Carnival in Cologne or Mardi Gras in New Orleans . This category also includes

2717-509: A shift in purpose and meaning. There are many reasons for continuing to handmake objects for use, for example these skills may be needed to repair manufactured items, or a unique design might be required which is not (or cannot be) found in the stores. Many crafts are considered as simple home maintenance, such as cooking, sewing and carpentry. For many people, handicrafts have also become an enjoyable and satisfying hobby. Handmade objects are often regarded as prestigious, where extra time and thought

2860-496: A similar plaque was place in Fort Mountain State Park in Georgia at the supposed site of one of Madoc's three stone fortresses. This plaque was removed in 2015 and the replacement made no further mention of Madoc. Folklore Each one of these, either singly or in combination, is considered a folklore artifact or traditional cultural expression . Just as essential as the form, folklore also encompasses

3003-426: A small sampling of objects and skills that are included in studies of material culture. Customary culture is remembered enactment, i.e. re-enactment. It is the patterns of expected behavior within a group, the "traditional and expected way of doing things" A custom can be a single gesture , such as thumbs down or a handshake . It can also be a complex interaction of multiple folk customs and artifacts as seen in

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3146-450: A social event during the winter months, or the gifting of a quilt to signify the importance of the event. Each of these—the traditional pattern chosen, the social event, and the gifting—occur within the broader context of the community. Even so, when considering context, the structure and characteristics of performance can be recognized, including an audience, a framing event, and the use of decorative figures and symbols, all of which go beyond

3289-400: A swell in popular interest in folk traditions, these community celebrations are becoming more numerous throughout the western world. While ostensibly parading the diversity of their community, economic groups have discovered that these folk parades and festivals are good for business. All shades of people are out on the streets, eating, drinking and spending. This attracts support not only from

3432-591: A tongue he understood. Jones' report says that he then lived with the Doeg for several months preaching the Gospel in Welsh and then returned to the British Colonies where he recorded his adventure in 1686. Jones's tract was printed by The Gentleman's Magazine , launching a slew of publications on the subject. The historian Gwyn A. Williams comments, "This is a complete farrago and may have been intended as

3575-572: A whole, even as it continues to be a point of discussion within the field itself. The term folkloristics , along with the alternative name folklore studies , became widely used in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. When the American Folklife Preservation Act (Public Law 94-201) was passed by the U.S. Congress in January 1976, to coincide with

3718-492: Is "not idle speculation… Decades of fieldwork have demonstrated conclusively that these groups do have their own folklore." In this modern understanding, folklore is a function of shared identity within any social group. This folklore can include jokes, sayings, and expected behavior in multiple variants, always transmitted in an informal manner. For the most part, it will be learned by observation, imitation, repetition, or correction by other group members. This informal knowledge

3861-457: Is a distinct branch of folklore that deals with activities passed on by children to other children, away from the influence or supervision of an adult. Children's folklore contains artifacts from all the standard folklore genres of verbal, material, and customary lore; it is however the child-to-child conduit that distinguishes these artifacts. For childhood is a social group where children teach, learn and share their own traditions, flourishing in

4004-400: Is also transmitted within a group, remains a practical hygiene and health issue and does not rise to the level of a group-defining tradition. Tradition is initially remembered behavior; once it loses its practical purpose, there is no reason for further transmission unless it has been imbued with meaning beyond the initial practicality of the action. This meaning is at the core of folkloristics,

4147-485: Is as close as folklorists can come to observing the transmission and social function of this folk knowledge before the spread of literacy during the 19th century. As we have seen with the other genres, the original collections of children's lore and games in the 19th century was driven by a fear that the culture of childhood would die out. Early folklorists, among them Alice Gomme in Britain and William Wells Newell in

4290-404: Is enmeshed in a multitude of differing identities and their concomitant social groups. The first group that each of us is born into is the family, and each family has its own unique family folklore . As a child grows into an individual, its identities also increase to include age, language, ethnicity, occupation, etc. Each of these cohorts has its own folklore, and as one folklorist points out, this

4433-541: Is found in an issue of the Journal of American Folklore , published in 1975, which is dedicated exclusively to articles on women's folklore, with approaches that had not come from a man's perspective. Other groups that were highlighted as part of this broadened understanding of the folk group were non-traditional families , occupational groups, and families that pursued the production of folk items over multiple generations. Folklorist Richard Dorson explained in 1976 that

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4576-451: Is found in hex signs on Pennsylvania Dutch barns, tin man sculptures made by metalworkers, front yard Christmas displays, decorated school lockers, carved gun stocks, and tattoos. "Words such as naive, self-taught, and individualistic are used to describe these objects, and the exceptional rather than the representative creation is featured." This is in contrast to the understanding of folklore artifacts that are nurtured and passed along within

4719-559: Is intended to organize and categorize the folklore artifacts; they provide common vocabulary and consistent labeling for folklorists to communicate with each other. That said, each artifact is unique; in fact, one of the characteristics of all folklore artifacts is their variation within genres and types. This is in direct contrast to manufactured goods, where the goal in production is to create identical products, and any variations are considered mistakes. It is, however, just this required variation that makes identification and classification of

4862-525: Is not just any conversation, but words and phrases conforming to a traditional configuration recognized by both the speaker and the audience. For narrative types , by definition, they have a consistent structure and follow an existing model in their narrative form. As just one simple example, in English, the phrase "An elephant walks into a bar…" instantaneously flags the following text as a joke . It might be one you have already heard, but it might be one that

5005-477: Is now named South America, that same map famously labels simply " America ". Martin Waldseemüller 's map of 1516 retreats considerably from his earlier map and back to classical authority, with the Asian land mass merging into North America, which he now calls Terra de Cuba Asie partis , and quietly drops the "America" label from South America, calling it merely Terra incognita . The western coast of

5148-411: Is old or obsolete. These folk artifacts continue to be passed along informally, as a rule anonymously, and always in multiple variants. The folk group is not individualistic; it is community-based and nurtures its lore in community. "As new groups emerge, new folklore is created… surfers, motorcyclists, computer programmers ". In direct contrast to high culture , where any single work of a named artist

5291-434: Is protected by copyright law , folklore is a function of shared identity within a common social group. Having identified folk artifacts, the professional folklorist strives to understand the significance of these beliefs, customs, and objects for the group, since these cultural units would not be passed along unless they had some continued relevance within the group. That meaning can, however, shift and morph; for example,

5434-578: Is spent in their creation and their uniqueness is valued. For the folklorist, these hand-crafted objects embody multifaceted relationships in the lives of the craftspeople and the users, a concept that has been lost with mass-produced items that have no connection to an individual craftsperson. Many traditional crafts, such as ironworking and glass-making, have been elevated to the fine or applied arts and taught in art schools; or they have been repurposed as folk art , characterized as objects whose decorative form supersedes their utilitarian needs. Folk art

5577-403: Is still transmitted orally and, indeed, continues to be generated in new forms and variants at an alarming rate. Below is listed a small sampling of types and examples of verbal lore. The genre of material culture includes all artifacts that can be touched, held, lived in, or eaten. They are tangible objects with a physical or mental presence, either intended for permanent use or to be used at

5720-669: Is the complex balance of continuity over change in both their design and their decoration. In Europe, prior to the Industrial Revolution , everything was made by hand. While some folklorists of the 19th century wanted to secure the oral traditions of the rural folk before the populace became literate, other folklorists sought to identify hand-crafted objects before their production processes were lost to industrial manufacturing. Just as verbal lore continues to be actively created and transmitted in today's culture, so these handicrafts can still be found all around us, with possibly

5863-540: Is used in discussions of material lore. Both formulations offer different perspectives on the same folkloric understanding, specifically that folklore artifacts need to remain embedded in their cultural environment if we are to gain insight into their meaning for the community. The concept of cultural (folklore) performance is shared with ethnography and anthropology among other social sciences. The cultural anthropologist Victor Turner identified four universal characteristics of cultural performance: playfulness, framing ,

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6006-428: Is used to confirm and reinforce the identity of the group. It can be used both internally within the group to express their common identity, for example in an initiation ceremony for new members. It can also be used externally to differentiate the group from outsiders, like a folk dance demonstration at a community festival. Significant to folklorists here is that there are two opposing but equally valid ways to use this in

6149-488: Is used to describe the majority of lands of Earth 's Western Hemisphere , particularly the Americas . The term arose in the early 16th century during Europe 's Age of Discovery , after Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci published the Latin -language pamphlet Mundus Novus , presenting his conclusion that these lands (soon called America based on Amerigo's name ) constitute a new continent . This realization expanded

6292-607: The Brut y Tywysogion . John Dee used Llwyd's manuscript when he submitted the treatise "Title Royal" to Queen Elizabeth in 1580, which stated that "The Lord Madoc, sonne to Owen Gwynned , Prince of Gwynedd , led a Colonie and inhabited in Terra Florida or thereabouts" in 1170. The story was first published by George Peckham 's as A True Report of the late Discoveries of the Newfound Landes (1583), and like Dee it

6435-583: The Terra Australis that had been posited as a hypothetical southern continent. All of the New World countries use the Latin script as its official script. The Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci is usually credited for coming up with the term "New World" ( Mundus Novus ) for the Americas in his 1503 letter, giving it its popular cachet, although similar terms had been used and applied before him. The Venetian explorer Alvise Cadamosto used

6578-842: The Bicentennial Celebration , folkloristics in the United States came of age. "…[Folklife] means the traditional expressive culture shared within the various groups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional; expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft; these expressions are mainly learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, and are generally maintained without benefit of formal instruction or institutional direction." Added to

6721-569: The Chronicles say Madoc then went back to Wales to get more people and made a second trip back to the New World. In the later 1600s Thomas Herbert popularised the stories told by Dee and Powel, adding more detail from sources unknown, suggesting that Madoc may have landed in Canada, Florida, or even Mexico, and reporting that Mexican sources stated that they used currachs . As immigrants came into contact with more Native American groups, more of

6864-606: The Gulf of Paria implied that a previously unknown continent must lie behind it. Columbus proposes that the South American landmass is not a "fourth" continent, but rather the terrestrial paradise of Biblical tradition, a land allegedly known, but undiscovered, by Christendom . In another letter to the nurse of Prince John, written 1500, Columbus refers to having reached a "new heavens and world" ("nuevo cielo é mundo") and that he had placed "another world" ("otro mundo") under

7007-619: The Halloween celebration of the 21st century is not the All Hallows' Eve of the Middle Ages and even gives rise to its own set of urban legends independent of the historical celebration; the cleansing rituals of Orthodox Judaism were originally good public health in a land with little water, but now these customs signify for some people identification as an Orthodox Jew. By comparison, a common action such as tooth brushing , which

7150-616: The Historic–Geographic Method , a methodology that dominated folkloristics in the first half of the 20th century. When William Thoms first published his appeal to document the verbal lore of the rural populations, it was believed these folk artifacts would die out as the population became literate. Over the past two centuries, this belief has proven to be wrong; folklorists continue to collect verbal lore in both written and spoken form from all social groups. Some variants might have been captured in published collections, but much of it

7293-811: The Mississippian and Hopewell traditions were not well known in Catlin's time). Supporters of this claim have drawn links between Madoc and the Mandan mythological figure "Lone Man", who, according to one tale, protected some villagers from a flooding river with a wooden corral. The Welsh Indian legend was revived in the 1840s and 1850s; this time the Zunis , Hopis , and Navajo were claimed to be of Welsh descent by George Ruxton (Hopis, 1846), P. G. S. Ten Broeck (Zunis, 1854), and Abbé Emmanuel Domenach (Zunis, 1860), among others. Brigham Young became interested in

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7436-566: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival celebrated each summer on the Mall in Washington, DC. A fourth category includes customs related to folk beliefs . Walking under a ladder is just one of many symbols considered unlucky . Occupational groups tend to have a rich history of customs related to their life and work, so the traditions of sailors or lumberjacks . The area of ecclesiastical folklore , which includes modes of worship not sanctioned by

7579-576: The West Indies with what returning sailors told him of the East Indies . Vespucci wrote a preliminary letter to Lorenzo, while anchored at Bezeguiche, which he sent back with the Portuguese fleet, which expressed a certain puzzlement about his conversations. Vespucci ultimately was convinced while on his mapping expedition of eastern Brazil from 1501 to 1502. After returning from Brazil in

7722-520: The turkey were originally domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples in Mesoamerica . Agriculturalists in the Andean region of South America brought forth the cassava , peanut , potato , quinoa and domesticated animals like the alpaca , guinea pig and llama . Other New World crops include the sweetpotato , cashew , cocoa , rubber , sunflower , tobacco , and vanilla , and fruits like

7865-510: The "Cambaraga"—white men who had come by sea 300 years before the Spanish. However, Harris's claims have never been independently verified. Several attempts to confirm Madoc's historicity have been made, but historians of early America, notably Samuel Eliot Morison , regard the story as a myth. Madoc's legend has been a notable subject for poets, however. The most famous account in English is Robert Southey 's long 1805 poem Madoc , which uses

8008-553: The "discoverer of the new globe" ("Colonus ille novi orbis repertor"). A year later, on 20 October 1494, Peter Martyr again refers to the marvels of the New Globe ("Novo Orbe") and the " Western Hemisphere " ("ab occidente hemisphero"). In Columbus's 1499 letter to the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, reporting the results of his third voyage, he relates how the massive waters of South America's Orinoco delta rushing into

8151-480: The 1506 Contarini–Rosselli map and the 1508 Johannes Ruysch map, bowing to Ptolemaic authority and Columbus's assertions, have the northern Asian landmass stretching well into the western hemisphere and merging with known North America, Labrador, Newfoundland, etc. These maps place the island of Japan near Cuba and leave the South American continent—Vespucci's "New World" proper—detached and floating below by itself. The Waldseemüller map of 1507, which accompanied

8294-699: The Algonquians as "Mandoag". The Reverend Morgan Jones told Thomas Lloyd , William Penn 's deputy, that he had been captured in 1669 in North Carolina by members of a tribe identified as the Doeg , who were said to be a part of the Tuscarora . (However, there is no evidence that the Doeg proper were part of the Tuscarora.) According to Jones, the chief spared his life when he heard Jones speak Welsh,

8437-500: The American Folklore Society brought the behavioral approach into open debate among folklorists. In 1972 Richard Dorson called out the "young Turks" for their movement toward a behavioral approach to folklore. This approach "shifted the conceptualization of folklore as an extractable item or 'text' to an emphasis on folklore as a kind of human behavior and communication. Conceptualizing folklore as behavior redefined

8580-419: The Americas as a new world. Peter Martyr used the term Orbe Novo , meaning "New Globe", in the title of his history of the discovery of the Americas, which began appearing in 1511. The Vespucci passage above applied the "New World" label to merely the continental landmass of South America . At the time, most of the continent of North America was not yet discovered, and Vespucci's comments did not eliminate

8723-591: The Americas remained unclear. That there must be a large ocean between Asia and the Americas was implied by the known existence of vast continuous sea along the coasts of East Asia . Given the size of the Earth as calculated by Eratosthenes this left a large space between Asia and the newly discovered lands. Even prior to Vespucci, several maps, e.g. the Cantino planisphere of 1502 and the Canerio map of 1504, placed

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8866-445: The Americas until they were introduced by post-Columbian contact in the 1490s. Many common crops were originally domesticated in the Americas before they spread worldwide after Columbian contact, and are still often referred to as " New World crops ". Common beans ( phaseolus ), maize , and squash —the " three sisters "—as well as the avocado , tomato , and wide varieties of capsicum ( bell pepper , chili pepper , etc.), and

9009-770: The Americas, to distinguish them from their counterparts in the "Old World" (Europe, Africa and Asia)—e.g., New World monkeys , New World vultures , New World warblers . The label is also often used in agriculture. Asia, Africa, and Europe share a common agricultural history stemming from the Neolithic Revolution , and the same domesticated plants and animals spread through these three continents thousands of years ago, making them largely indistinct and useful to classify together as "Old World". Common Old World crops, e.g., barley , lentils , oats , peas , rye , wheat , and domesticated animals, e.g., cattle , chickens , goats , horses , pigs , sheep , did not exist in

9152-528: The Atlantic coast of North America in what is present-day Canada and the United States . The term "New World" is still commonly employed when discussing historic spaces, particularly the voyages of Christopher Columbus and the subsequent European colonization of the Americas . It has been framed as being problematic for applying a colonial perspective of discovery and not doing justice to either

9295-789: The Caribbean coast of South America; various islands in the West Indies and the Bahamas along with Bermuda; and the mouth of the Amazon River". They are reported to be the founders of various civilisations such as the Aztec , the Maya and the Inca . Folk tradition has long claimed that a site called " Devil's Backbone " at Rose Island , about fourteen miles upstream from Louisville, Kentucky ,

9438-561: The History and Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society and concerned with the connections of folklore with history, as well as the history of folklore studies. Lacking context, folklore artifacts would be uninspiring objects without any life of their own. It is only through performance that the artifacts come alive as an active and meaningful component of a social group; the intergroup communication arises in

9581-487: The Indies "), and consequently came up with alternative names to refer to them. Only a few weeks after Columbus's return from his first voyage, Martyr wrote letters referring to Columbus's discovered lands as the "western antipodes" ("antipodibus occiduis", letter of 14 May 1493), the "new hemisphere of the earth" ("novo terrarum hemisphaerio", 13 September 1493). In a letter dated 1 November 1493, he refers to Columbus as

9724-699: The Making of a Myth , makes it clear that Madoc is not mentioned in any of Gutun Owain's surviving manuscripts. The Madoc legend attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era , when Welsh and English writers used it to bolster British claims in the New World versus those of Spain. The earliest surviving full account of Madoc's voyage, the first to make the claim that Madoc had come to America before Columbus, appears in Humphrey Llwyd's Cronica Walliae (published in 1559), an English adaptation of

9867-534: The New World, including the Pacific Ocean , was discovered in 1513 by Vasco Núñez de Balboa , twenty years after Columbus' initial voyage. It was a few more years before the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan 's between 1519 and 1522 determined that the Pacific Ocean definitely formed a single large body of water that separates Asia from the Americas. Several years later, the Pacific Coast of North America

10010-635: The New or Old World; however, legends connect him with certain sites, such as Devil's Backbone , located on the Ohio River at Fourteen Mile Creek near Louisville, Kentucky . Madoc's purported father, Owain Gwynedd , was a real king of Gwynedd during the 12th century and is widely considered one of the greatest Welsh rulers of the Middle Ages . His reign was fraught with battles with other Welsh princes and with Henry II of England . At his death in 1170,

10153-484: The Prince and his recruiters sailed west a second time to "that Westerne countrie" and ported in "Mexico", a fact that too was cited by Reuben T. Durrett in his work Traditions of the earliest visits of foreigners to north America , and stated he was never to return to Wales again. John Smith, historian of Virginia, wrote in 1624 of the Chronicles of Wales reports Madoc went to the New World in 1170 A.D. (over 300 years before Columbus) with some men and women. Smith says

10296-537: The Second World War, folklorists began to articulate a more holistic approach toward their subject matter. In tandem with the growing sophistication in the social sciences , attention was no longer limited to the isolated artifact, but extended to include the artifact embedded in an active cultural environment. One early proponent was Alan Dundes with his essay "Texture, Text and Context", first published 1964. A public presentation in 1967 by Dan Ben-Amos at

10439-603: The United States, felt a need to capture the unstructured and unsupervised street life and activities of children before it was lost. This fear proved to be unfounded. In a comparison of any modern school playground during recess and the painting of "Children's Games" by Pieter Breugel the Elder we can see that the activity level is similar, and many of the games from the 1560 painting are recognizable and comparable to modern variations still played today. These same artifacts of childlore, in innumerable variations, also continue to serve

10582-505: The United States. These "Welsh Indians" were credited with the construction of a number of landmarks throughout the Midwestern United States , and a number of white travelers were inspired to go looking for them. The Madoc story has been the subject of much fantasy in the context of possible pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact . No archaeological, linguistic, or other evidence of such a man or his voyages has been found in

10725-653: The Welsh Indians with the Mandan people, who were said to differ from their neighbours in culture, language, and appearance. The painter George Catlin suggested the Mandans were descendants of Madoc and his fellow voyagers in North American Indians (1841); he found the round Mandan Bull Boat similar to the Welsh coracle , and he thought the advanced architecture of Mandan villages must have been learned from Europeans (advanced North American societies such as

10868-704: The ancestors of the Cherokee, who eventually drove them from the region. Sevier had also written in 1799 of the alleged discovery of six skeletons in brass armour bearing the Welsh coat-of-arms. He claims that Madoc and the Welsh were first in Alabama. In 1824, Thomas S. Hinde wrote a letter to John S. Williams, editor of The American Pioneer, regarding the Madoc Tradition. In the letter, Hinde claimed to have gathered testimony from numerous sources that stated Welsh people under Owen Ap Zuinch had come to America in

11011-413: The artifacts and turn them into something else; so Old McDonald's farm is transformed from animal noises to the scatological version of animal poop. This childlore is characterized by "its lack of dependence on literary and fixed form. Children…operate among themselves in a world of informal and oral communication, unimpeded by the necessity of maintaining and transmitting information by written means". This

11154-423: The business community, but also from federal and state organizations for these local street parties. Paradoxically, in parading diversity within the community, these events have come to authenticate true community, where business interests ally with the varied (folk) social groups to promote the interests of the community as a whole. This is just a small sampling of types and examples of customary lore. Childlore

11297-554: The chief of the navigation of Spain. Although the proceedings of the Toro-Burgos conferences are missing, it is almost certain that Vespucci articulated his recent 'New World' thesis to his fellow navigators there. During these conferences, Spanish officials seem to have accepted that the Antilles and the known stretch of Central America were not the Indies as they had hoped. Though Columbus still insisted they were. They set out

11440-507: The community as knowledgeable in their traditional lore. They are not the anonymous "folk", the nameless mass without of history or individuality. The audience of this performance is the other half in the transmission process; they listen, watch, and remember. Few of them will become active tradition-bearers; many more will be passive tradition-bearers who maintain a memory of this specific traditional artifact, in both its presentation and its content. New World The term " New World "

11583-457: The complexity of the interpretation, the birthday party for a seven-year-old will not be identical to the birthday party for that same child as a six-year-old, even though they follow the same model. For each artifact embodies a single variant of a performance in a given time and space. The task of the folklorist becomes to identify within this surfeit of variables the constants and the expressed meaning that shimmer through all variations: honoring of

11726-472: The continent is a single example of an ethnic group parading their separateness (differential behavior ), and encouraging Americans of all stripes to show alliance to this colorful ethnic group. These festivals and parades, with a target audience of people who do not belong to the social group, intersect with the interests and mission of public folklorists , who are engaged in the documentation, preservation, and presentation of traditional forms of folklife. With

11869-609: The custom, either as performer or audience, signifies acknowledgment of that social group. Some customary behavior is intended to be performed and understood only within the group itself, so the handkerchief code sometimes used in the gay community or the initiation rituals of the Freemasons. Other customs are designed specifically to represent a social group to outsiders, those who do not belong to this group. The St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York and in other communities across

12012-456: The defining features a challenge. While this classification is essential for the subject area of folkloristics, it remains just labeling and adds little to an understanding of the traditional development and meaning of the artifacts themselves. Necessary as they are, genre classifications are misleading in their oversimplification of the subject area. Folklore artifacts are never self-contained, they do not stand in isolation but are particulars in

12155-583: The descendants of the Madoc Welsh Indians. They did not find any, nor did John Evans . In 1810, John Sevier , the first governor of Tennessee, wrote to his friend Major Amos Stoddard about a conversation he had in 1782 with the old Cherokee chief Oconostota concerning ancient fortifications built along the Alabama River . The chief allegedly told him that the forts were built by a white people called "Welsh", as protection against

12298-527: The developmental function of this childlore, the artifacts themselves have been in play for centuries. Below is listed just a small sampling of types and examples of childlore and games. A case has been made for considering folk history as a distinct sub-category of folklore, an idea that has received attention from such folklorists as Richard Dorson. This field of study is represented in The Folklore Historian , an annual journal sponsored by

12441-534: The dominion of the Kings of Spain. The term "New World" ( Mundus Novus ) was coined in Spring 1503 by Amerigo Vespucci in a letter written to his friend and former patron Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de' Medici , which was published in Latin ) in 1503–04 under the title Mundus Novus . Vespucci's letter contains the first explicit articulation in print of the hypothesis that the lands discovered by European navigators to

12584-410: The established church tends to be so large and complex that it is usually treated as a specialized area of folk customs; it requires considerable expertise in standard church ritual in order to adequately interpret folk customs and beliefs that originated in official church practice. Customary folklore is always a performance, be it a single gesture or a complex of scripted customs, and participating in

12727-434: The extensive array of other legislation designed to protect the natural and cultural heritage of the United States, this law also marks a shift in national awareness. It gives voice to a growing understanding that cultural diversity is a national strength and a resource worthy of protection. Paradoxically, it is a unifying feature, not something that separates the citizens of a country. "We no longer view cultural difference as

12870-422: The famous Cosmographiae Introductio volume, which includes reprints of Vespucci's letters, comes closest to modernity by placing a completely open sea, with no stretching land fingers, between Asia on the eastern side and the New World. It is represented two times in the same map in a different way: with and without a sea passage in the middle of what is now named Central America on the western side—which, on what

13013-496: The first classification system for folktales in 1910. This was later expanded into the Aarne–Thompson classification system by Stith Thompson and remains the standard classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. As the number of classified oral artifacts grew, similarities were noted in items that had been collected from very different geographic regions, ethnic groups, and epochs, giving rise to

13156-411: The generations and subject to the same forces of conservative tradition and individual variation" that are found in all folk artifacts. Folklorists are interested in the physical form, the method of manufacture or construction, the pattern of use, as well as the procurement of the raw materials. The meaning to those who both make and use these objects is important. Of primary significance in these studies

13299-569: The geographical horizon of earlier European geographers, who had thought that the world only included Afro-Eurasian lands. Africa , Asia , and Europe became collectively called the " Old World " of the Eastern Hemisphere , while the Americas were then referred to as "the fourth part of the world", or the "New World". Antarctica and Oceania are considered neither Old World nor New World lands, since they were only discovered by Europeans much later. They were associated instead with

13442-420: The historic or geographic complexity of the world. It is argued that both 'worlds' and the age of Western colonialism rather entered a new stage, as in the ' modern world '. In wine terminology , "New World" uses a particular definition. " New World wines " include not only North American and South American wines, but also those from South Africa , Australia , New Zealand , and all other locations outside

13585-404: The individual within the circle of family and friends, gifting to express their value and worth to the group, and of course, the festival food and drink as signifiers of the event. The formal definition of verbal lore is words, both written and oral, that are "spoken, sung, voiced forms of traditional utterance that show repetitive patterns." Crucial here are the repetitive patterns. Verbal lore

13728-417: The items were used, with actors reenacting the everyday lives of people from all segments of society, relying heavily on the material artifacts of a pre-industrial society. Many locations even duplicate the processing of the objects, thus creating new objects of an earlier historic time period. Living museums are now found throughout the world as part of a thriving heritage industry . This list represents just

13871-431: The job of folklorists..." Folklore became a verb, an action, something that people do, not just something that they have. It is in the performance and the active context that folklore artifacts get transmitted in informal, direct communication, either verbally or in demonstration. Performance includes all the different modes and manners in which this transmission occurs. Transmission is a communicative process requiring

14014-408: The language of a folklore performance. Material culture requires some moulding to turn it into a performance. Should we consider the performance of the creation of the artifact, as in a quilting party, or the performance of the recipients who use the quilt to cover their marriage bed? Here the language of context works better to describe the quilting of patterns copied from the grandmother, quilting as

14157-850: The latter were claimed to be "Welsh Indians". On 26 November 1608, Peter Wynne, a member of Captain Christopher Newport 's exploration party to the villages of the Monacan people , Virginia Siouan speakers above the falls of the James River in Virginia , wrote a letter to John Egerton , informing him that some members of Newport's party believed the pronunciation of the Monacans' language resembled "Welch", which Wynne spoke, and asked Wynne to act as interpreter. The Monacan were among those non-Algonquian tribes collectively referred to by

14300-417: The legend, Madoc and his brother (Rhirid or Rhiryd) were among them, though no contemporary record attests to this. The earliest certain reference to a seafaring Madoc or Madog appears in a cywydd by the Welsh poet Maredudd ap Rhys (fl. 1450–1483) of Powys , which mentions a Madog who is a descendant of Owain Gwynedd and who voyaged to the sea. The poem is addressed to a local squire, thanking him for

14443-636: The legendary son of Owain Gwynedd, Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd. The Prince Madog , a research vessel owned by the Bangor University and P&O Maritime, entered service in 2001, replacing an earlier research vessel of the same name that first entered service in 1968. In 1953, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) erected a plaque at Fort Morgan on the shores of Mobile Bay, Alabama , reading: In memory of Prince Madoc

14586-478: The most part self-explanatory, these categories include physical objects ( material folklore ), common sayings, expressions, stories and songs ( verbal folklore ), and beliefs and ways of doing things ( customary folklore ). There is also a fourth major subgenre defined for children's folklore and games ( childlore ), as the collection and interpretation of this fertile topic is particular to school yards and neighborhood streets. Each of these genres and their subtypes

14729-411: The necessary beat to complex physical rhythms and movements, be it hand-clapping, jump roping, or ball bouncing. Furthermore, many physical games are used to develop strength, coordination and endurance of the players. For some team games, negotiations about the rules can run on longer than the game itself as social skills are rehearsed. Even as we are just now uncovering the neuroscience that undergirds

14872-441: The new goal for Spanish explorers: find a sea passage or strait through the Americas, a path to Asia proper. The term New World was not universally accepted, entering English only relatively late, and has more recently been subject to criticism . While it became generally accepted after Amerigo Vespucci that Christopher Columbus ' discoveries were not Asia but a "New World", the geographic relationship between Europe and

15015-460: The next meal. Most of these folklore artifacts are single objects that have been created by hand for a specific purpose; however, folk artifacts can also be mass-produced, such as dreidels or Christmas decorations. These items continue to be considered folklore because of their long (pre-industrial) history and their customary use. All of these material objects "existed prior to and continue alongside mechanized industry. … [They are] transmitted across

15158-632: The noted poet Alexander S. Pushkin composed a short poem "Madoc in Wales" (Медок в Уаллах, 1829) on the topic. Madoc's landing place has also been suggested to be "Mobile, Alabama; Florida; Newfoundland; Newport, Rhode Island; Yarmouth, Nova Scotia; Virginia; points in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean including the mouth of the Mississippi River; the Yucatan; the isthmus of Tehuantepec, Panama;

15301-400: The opinion of the ancients was, that the greater part of the world beyond the equinoctial line to the south was not land, but only sea, which they have called the Atlantic; and even if they have affirmed that any continent is there, they have given many reasons for denying it is inhabited. But this opinion is false, and entirely opposed to the truth. My last voyage has proved it, for I have found

15444-547: The past that continued to exist within the lower strata of society. The " Kinder- und Hausmärchen " of the Brothers Grimm (first published 1812) is the best known but by no means only collection of verbal folklore of the European peasantry of that time. This interest in stories, sayings, and songs continued throughout the 19th century and aligned the fledgling discipline of folkloristics with literature and mythology. By

15587-531: The performance and this is where transmission of these cultural elements takes place. American folklorist Roger D. Abrahams has described it thus: "Folklore is folklore only when performed. As organized entities of performance, items of folklore have a sense of control inherent in them, a power that can be capitalized upon and enhanced through effective performance." Without transmission, these items are not folklore, they are just individual quirky tales and objects. This understanding in folkloristics only occurred in

15730-506: The period of romantic nationalism in Europe. A particular figure in this development was Johann Gottfried von Herder , whose writings in the 1770s presented oral traditions as organic processes grounded in the locale. After the German states were invaded by Napoleonic France , Herder's approach was adopted by many of his fellow Germans, who systematized the recorded folk traditions and used them in their process of nation building . This process

15873-462: The possibility that the islands of the Antilles discovered earlier by Christopher Columbus might still be the eastern edges of Asia, as Columbus continued to insist until his death in 1506. A 1504 globe , possibly created by Leonardo da Vinci , depicts the New World as only South America , excluding North America and Central America . A conference of navigators known as Junta de Navegantes

16016-408: The rural poor as folk. The common feature in this expanded definition of folk was their identification as the underclass of society. Moving forward into the 20th century, in tandem with new thinking in the social sciences , folklorists also revised and expanded their concept of the folk group. By the 1960s, it was understood that social groups , i.e., folk groups, were all around us; each individual

16159-420: The same function of learning and practicing skills needed for growth. So bouncing and swinging rhythms and rhymes encourage development of balance and coordination in infants and children. Verbal rhymes like Peter Piper picked... serve to increase both the oral and aural acuity of children. Songs and chants, accessing a different part of the brain, are used to memorize series ( Alphabet song ). They also provide

16302-410: The second half of the 20th century, when the two terms " folklore performance " and "text and context" dominated discussions among folklorists. These terms are not contradictory or even mutually exclusive. As borrowings from other fields of study, one or the other linguistic formulation is more appropriate to any given discussion. Performance is frequently tied to verbal and customary lore, whereas context

16445-521: The self-representation of a community. Different genres are frequently combined with each other to mark an event. So a birthday celebration might include a song or formulaic way of greeting the birthday child (verbal), presentation of a cake and wrapped presents (material), as well as customs to honor the individual, such as sitting at the head of the table and blowing out the candles with a wish. There might also be special games played at birthday parties, which are not generally played at other times. Adding to

16588-558: The seventeenth century a fragment of a reputed copy of the work is said to have been found in Poitiers ". It provides no topographical details relating to North America, but says that Madoc (not related to Owain in the fragment) discovered an island paradise, where he intended "to launch a new kingdom of love and music". There are also claims that the Welsh poet and genealogist Gutun Owain wrote about Madoc before 1492. Gwyn Williams in Madoc,

16731-444: The sophisticated world of adults, and quite as little affected by it. Of particular interest to folklorists here is the mode of transmission of these artifacts; this lore circulates exclusively within an informal pre-literate children's network or folk group. It does not include artifacts taught to children by adults. However children can take the taught and teach it further to other children, turning it into childlore. Or they can take

16874-403: The speaker has just thought up within the current context. Another example is the child's song Old MacDonald Had a Farm , where each performance is distinctive in the animals named, their order, and their sounds. Songs such as this are used to express cultural values (farms are important, farmers are old and weather-beaten) and teach children about different domesticated animals. Verbal folklore

17017-675: The spring of 1503, Vespucci authored the Mundus Novus letter in Lisbon and sent it to Lorenzo in Florence , with the famous opening paragraph: In passed days I wrote very fully to you of my return from new countries, which have been found and explored with the ships, at the cost and by the command of this Most Serene King of Portugal; and it is lawful to call it a new world, because none of these countries were known to our ancestors and to all who hear about them they will be entirely new. For

17160-625: The story to explore the poet's freethinking and egalitarian ideals. Southey wrote Madoc to help finance a trip of his own to America, where he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge hoped to establish a Utopian state they called a " Pantisocracy ". Southey's poem in turn inspired the twentieth-century poet Paul Muldoon to write Madoc: A Mystery , which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1992. It explores what might have happened if Southey and Coleridge had succeeded in coming to America to found their "ideal state". In Russian,

17303-412: The study of a group: you can start with an identified group in order to explore its folklore, or you can identify folklore items and use them to identify the social group. Beginning in the 1960s, a further expansion of the concept of folk began to unfold through the study of folklore. Individual researchers identified folk groups that had previously been overlooked and ignored. One notable example of this

17446-405: The study of folklore is "concerned with the study of traditional culture, or the unofficial culture" that is the folk culture, "as opposed to the elite culture, not for the sake of proving a thesis but to learn about the mass of [humanity] overlooked by the conventional disciplines." Individual folklore artifacts are commonly classified as one of three types: material, verbal or customary lore. For

17589-470: The study of folklore. With the increasing theoretical sophistication of the social sciences , it has become evident that folklore is a naturally occurring and necessary component of any social group; it is indeed all around us. Folklore does not have to be old or antiquated; it continues to be created and transmitted, and in any group, it is used to differentiate between "us" and "them." Folklore began to distinguish itself as an autonomous discipline during

17732-593: The supposed Hopi-Welsh connection: in 1858 Young sent a Welshman with Jacob Hamblin to the Hopi mesas to check for Welsh-speakers there. None were found, but in 1863 Hamblin brought three Hopi men to Salt Lake City , where they were "besieged by Welshmen wanting them to utter Celtic words", to no avail. Llewelyn Harris, a Welsh-American Mormon missionary who visited the Zuni in 1878, wrote that they had many Welsh words in their language, and that they claimed their descent from

17875-518: The term "un altro mondo" ("another world") to refer to sub-Saharan Africa , which he explored in 1455 and 1456 on behalf of the Portuguese. This was merely a literary flourish, not a suggestion of a new "fourth" part of the world. Cadamosto was aware that sub-Saharan Africa was part of the African continent. Peter Martyr d'Anghiera , an Italian chronicler at the service of Spain , doubted Christopher Columbus 's claims to have reached East Asia ("

18018-420: The topic, there are "four functions to folklore": The folk of the 19th century, the social group identified in the original term "folklore" , was characterized by being rural, illiterate, and poor. They were the peasants living in the countryside, in contrast to the urban populace of the cities. Only toward the end of the century did the urban proletariat (on the coattails of Marxist theory) become included with

18161-478: The totality of their customs and beliefs as folklore. This distinction aligned American folkloristics with cultural anthropology and ethnology , using the same techniques of data collection in their field research. This divided alliance of folkloristics between the humanities in Europe and the social sciences in America offers a wealth of theoretical vantage points and research tools to the field of folkloristics as

18304-561: The traditional wine-growing regions of Europe, North Africa and the Near East . The usefulness of these terms for wines though have been questioned as arbitrary and too generalized. In a biological context, species can be divided into those in the Old World ( Palearctic , Afrotropic ) and those in the New World ( Nearctic , Neotropic ). Biological taxonomists often attach the "New World" label to groups of species found exclusively in

18447-453: The transmission of these artifacts from one region to another or from one generation to the next. Folklore is not something one can typically gain from a formal school curriculum or study in the fine arts . Instead, these traditions are passed along informally from one individual to another, either through verbal instruction or demonstration. The academic study of folklore is called folklore studies or folkloristics, and it can be explored at

18590-464: The turn of the 20th century, the number and sophistication of folklore studies and folklorists had grown both in Europe and North America. Whereas European folklorists remained focused on the oral folklore of the homogenous peasant populations in their regions, the American folklorists, led by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict , chose to consider Native American cultures in their research, and included

18733-475: The twelfth century, over three hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Hinde claimed that in 1799, six soldiers had been dug up near Jeffersonville, Indiana , on the Ohio River with breastplates that contained Welsh coats-of-arms. In all, at least thirteen real tribes, five unidentified tribes, and three unnamed tribes have been suggested as "Welsh Indians". Eventually, the legend settled on identifying

18876-477: The undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. levels. The word folklore , a compound of folk and lore , was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms , who contrived the term as a replacement for the contemporary terminology of "popular antiquities" or "popular literature". The second half of the word, lore , comes from Old English lār 'instruction'. It is the knowledge and traditions of

19019-432: The use of symbolic language, and employing the subjunctive mood . In viewing the performance, the audience leaves the daily reality to move into a mode of make-believe, or "what if?" It is self-evident that this fits well with all types of verbal lore, where reality has no place among the symbols, fantasies, and nonsense of traditional tales, proverbs, and jokes. Customs and the lore of children and games also fit easily into

19162-688: The utility of the object. Before the Second World War , folk artifacts had been understood and collected as cultural shards of an earlier time. They were considered individual vestigial artifacts, with little or no function in the contemporary culture. Given this understanding, the goal of the folklorist was to capture and document them before they disappeared. They were collected with no supporting data, bound in books, archived and classified more or less successfully. The Historic–Geographic Method worked to isolate and track these collected artifacts, mostly verbal lore, across space and time. Following

19305-475: The watering stop at Bezeguiche in present-day Dakar , Senegal , as Vespucci was on his expedition to chart the coast of newly discovered Brazil and the ships of the Second Portuguese India armada , commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral , were returning from India . Having already visited the Americas in prior years, Vespucci likely found it difficult to reconcile what he had already seen in

19448-489: The west were not the edges of Asia, as asserted by Christopher Columbus , but rather an entirely different continent that represented a "New World". According to Mundus Novus , Vespucci realized that he was in a "New World" on 17 August 1501 as he arrived in Brazil and compared the nature and people of the place with what Portuguese sailors told him about Asia . A chance meeting between two different expeditions occurred at

19591-406: Was assembled by the Spanish monarchs at Toro in 1505 and continued at Burgos in 1508 to digest all existing information about the Indies, come to an agreement on what had been discovered, and set out the future goals of Spanish exploration. Amerigo Vespucci attended both conferences, and seems to have had an outsized influence on them—at Burgos, he ended up being appointed the first piloto mayor ,

19734-437: Was enthusiastically embraced by smaller nations, like Finland, Estonia, and Hungary, which were seeking political independence from their dominant neighbors. Folklore, as a field of study, further developed among 19th-century European scholars, who were contrasting tradition with the newly developing modernity . Its focus was the oral folklore of the rural peasant populations, which were considered as residues and survivals of

19877-640: Was found on the site. The township of Madoc, Ontario , and the nearby village of Madoc are both named in the prince's memory, as are several local guest houses and pubs throughout North America and the United Kingdom. The Welsh town of Porthmadog (meaning "Madoc's Port" in English) and the village of Tremadog ("Madoc's Town") in the county of Gwynedd are actually named after the industrialist and Member of Parliament William Alexander Madocks , their principal developer, and additionally influenced by

20020-487: Was mapped. The discovery of the Bering Straits in the early 18th century, established that Asia and North America were not connected by land. But some European maps of the 16th century, including the 1533 Johannes Schöner globe , still continued to depict North America as connected by a land bridge to Asia. In 1524, the term "New World" was used by Giovanni da Verrazzano in a record of his voyage that year along

20163-510: Was once home to a colony of Welsh-speaking Indians. The eighteenth-century Missouri River explorer John Evans of Waunfawr in Wales took up his journey in part to find the Welsh-descended "Padoucas" or "Madogwys" tribes. In northwest Georgia , legends of the Welsh have become part of the myth surrounding the unknown origin of a mysterious rock formation on Fort Mountain . Historian, Gwyn A. Williams, author of Madoc: The Making of

20306-513: Was the original folklore , the artifacts defined by William Thoms as older, oral cultural traditions of the rural populace. In his 1846 published call for help in documenting antiquities, Thoms was echoing scholars from across the European continent to collect artifacts of verbal lore. By the beginning of the 20th century, these collections had grown to include artifacts from around the world and across several centuries. A system to organize and categorize them became necessary. Antti Aarne published

20449-524: Was used to support English claims to the Americas. It was picked up in David Powel 's Historie of Cambria (1584), and Richard Hakluyt 's The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589). Dee went so far as to assert that Brutus of Troy and King Arthur as well as Madoc had conquered lands in the Americas and therefore their heir Elizabeth I of England had

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