New Focus on Retrospective Methods, a collection of articles dealing with Northern European, Baltic, and Finno-Ugric antiquity, echoes a discussion implicit in nineteenth-century archeologists’ search for keys to ancient Egyptian culture, culminating in the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. How does one study a past culture with sparse, if any, written record-keeping? How can one portray a culture based on such sparse clues as chance may have preserved on buildings or gravesites?

In the book’s first article it becomes clear that threads lead back from the recent past into more distant eras. Evolutionary approaches to culture would assume this; these threads are also demonstrable. In more recent historical periods they may exist primarily in writing, but have their foundation in unwritten content transmitted orally, in material culture, or otherwise. Present in written form from the fifteenth century onwards, in the case of a good many European examples, these threads can serve as a guide to a less-documented longer-ago past. The mere fact that they relay content previously transmitted orally does not mean that they are unreliable or flawed.

Sources may also include ancient and present-day maps, place names, tales, festivals, games, and crafts, along with archaeological evidence such as house foundations, fence rows, stone walls, wells, and burial mounds. New Focus calls for the use of folkloristics, history of religion, etymology, historical geography, historical linguistics, iconography, and ethnic and cultural history, among other disciplines (12). The articles exemplify these approaches. Hermeneutics calls for a multi-faceted approach; if written sources are sparse, maps, etymology, or tales preserved in oral tradition may provide essential clues. This collection of articles aims to assist researchers in a variety of disciplines.

Constructing an analysis from a variety of source materials, rather than restricting it to written or contemporary oral sources or observations, is anything but new. Medievalists have been branching out in this way for a century or more, as have practitioners of other scholarly disciplines. Retrospective methods are not to blame for some early twentieth-century scholars’ “naïve” use of them (12). Articles in the collection include studies from folkloristics (Frog, Gunnell, Heide, Sesselja Helgadóttir, and Savborg), history of religion (Frog, Gunnell, Heide, Schjødt), etymology (Heide), iconography and cultural history (Simek), Uralic historical linguistics (Saarikivi), and historical geography (Antonson).

Retrospective threads often come from sixteenth- to twentieth-century written sources providing orally preserved or traditional material from a pre-literate past. In 2009 scholars from nineteen countries founded the Retrospective Methods Network, now with more than ninety members (12).

Folklorists may find the book’s first chapter, by the editors, and the second, by Terry Gunnell, of great use in classroom discussions of orally preserved or traditional material. It may be helpful at interdisciplinary conferences. Folklore has maintained its reliance on orally transmitted and traditional material since its nineteenth-century inception.

Terry Gunnell’s article, the second in the series, begins with the puzzling qualities of certain prehistoric mounds in Scandinavia. Gunnell documented connecting lines between ancient mounds on northern European farms and the respect and attention contemporary neighbors and property owners paid them. They reached back to pre-Enlightenment folk beliefs about the afterlife, in close association with locally rooted pre-Christian religious practices.

Jens-Peter Schjødt goes a step farther to assert, based on late-fifteenth-century material, that Scandinavian pre-Christian myths and practices did not constitute a religion at all in the present-day sense of the word, but rather folklore.

Does everything in the end come down to the meaning of words? Eldar Heide describes a method, based on etymology, which casts light on puzzling areas through the history of words’ meanings. Heide locates a Uralic influence on northern Eurasian culture due to the presence of loan-words from Uralic languages and other evidence of long-standing cultural contacts via the timing of those loan-words’ vernacular use in place names in various communities.

Hans Antonson presents case studies involving post-medieval maps as a guide to the formation and abandonment of villages in the more distant, preliterate past.

Frog’s article, perhaps the most interesting for folklorists, models how to trace motif-distribution geographically and chronologically, and how to differentiate its various features in terms of early and late medieval counterparts, all with relevance to tales of the theft of the thunder-instrument (ATU 1148B). Thunder, closely related to fire because of its fire-starting propensities, appears in discourse related to the forging of weapons, among other contexts.

The retrospective method depends on archaeological, vernacular, and written sources. Tale elements relatively similar in many variants may testify to the wide distribution of the tale or its usefulness in a variety of contexts. Conclusions may require buttressing from a variety of related fields, such as historical linguistics and archaeology, and may involve insight into and boldness in documenting parallel or similar features. Folklorists and researchers in cultural history may encounter in these articles new tools for research and new approaches to consider.

As John McDowell reminds us in Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico’s Costa Chica (2000), a ballad—based more or less narrowly on specific tales or accounts—is itself a reconstruction, not a construction. Even as it emerges from the mind and the voice of the singer in a moment of performance for a particular audience, at its base are the historical rules of its genre and historical events perceived and enhanced by the processes of tradition.

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[Review length: 878 words • Review posted on February 10, 2016]