Talk:Germanic folklore

Deletion of page content

Hi everyone, I noticed that last month, the page content was deleted and replaced with a redirect. Given that this is on par really with a page move in significance, I wanted to check there was a consensus in doing this.

I personally am in favour of keeping the old content, although potentially with a slight reword to emphasise that modern Germanic peoples/ Germanic-speaking peoples are not the same as ancient Germanic peoples and that their folklore is not going to be unchanged in the time between the two. Given that some aspects do appear to be carried over to varying extents from the pre-Christian period such as dwarves, elves and ettins, it makes sense to me to have a page grouping them. If this is to happen, I am absolutely for explaining that they are not "pure" continuations of ancient folklore, free of outside influence, but at the same time ancient Germanic folklore was also not free from outside influence. Folklore is very fluid and is never "pure". If this page is kept as a redirect, it follows that the same should be done with Celtic folklore and Slavic folklore, the modern forms of which are also for certain influenced by cultural factors such as Christianity.

Anyway, what do you lot think? Ingwina (talk) 20:35, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

As the old page was nothing more than a list of links to generally dubious articles (Wikipedia's coverage of folklore and folklore studies over the years has been, I am sad to report, exceptionally poor, despite my efforts), I personally don't see anything worth saving there. Proto-Germanic folklore is an effort to resolve these issues, and we could always link to other, related forms in the "see also" section of that article. That said, I would be willing to contribute to rewrites of Scandinavian folklore (which currently redirects to the much broader topic of Nordic folklore), English folklore, German folklore, etc. English Wikipedia has all the potential for becoming the English speaking world's go-to source for these topics, but there's a lot of work to be done before that potential is realized. :bloodofox: (talk) 23:57, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

So just to check I understand your standpoint, you agree that the modern folklores are related to proto-Germanic folklore just that there is no point linking to them through this page due to their low quality, but that they can be placed at the bottom of the proto-Germanic folklore page? I completely agree that European folklore is really badly covered compared to lots of other topics - I'd also be keen to join in a concerted effort to improve them. Ingwina (talk) 07:36, 3 September 2022 (UTC)