Want to hear a small pet peeve of ours about St. Patrick’s Day?

It’s probably not going to be what you think it is. In fact, we’re willing to bet that you’re expecting us to say something like…

“Man, it sucks that every St. Patrick’s Day people glorify the guy who drove the snakes out of Ireland. Don’t they know that the SNAKES are actually the PAGANS?”

or

“Man, why has St. Patrick’s Day become all about drinking? This is meant to be a celebration of Irish culture!”

or

“Man, what about St. Gertrude, the patron saint of CATS?? Her day is also today!!”

But no – it’s related to all of that, but it’s a little more complicated. 

What drives us crazy is that every St. Patrick’s Day, we see people on the Internet fighting about the dreaded “A” word – authenticity.

Miriam-Webster says that “authentic” means “not false or imitation: real, actual. Made or done the same as an original.” It sounds like it’s pretty straightforward, but, in folklore studies, it’s really not.

“Authenticity” is actually a hotly debated term in our field. In fact, folklorist Regina Bendix wrote a whole book on the subject called In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies in which she effectively demonstrates that 1) people have been obsessed with authenticity since almost the dawn of time, 2) folklorists have not been immune to this, and 3) folklorists really shouldn’t care about this at all.

And we think she’s right. 

Basically, Bendix spends the whole book “[a]rguing against the dichotomies implied in the very idea of authenticity […] underscor[ing] the emptiness of efforts to distinguish between folklore and fakelore, between echt (real) and ersatz (substitute)” (to quote the back cover.)

Why? Because ultimately there’s no such thing as an inauthentic folk tradition. If you’re following tradition in some way, it’s folklore. If you haven’t got all the details quite right, it’s still folklore. If you completely made up the tradition five minutes ago, and now you’re doing some kind of folkloristic ritual about it with your friends, it is still folklore and, as folklorists, we care about it.

Folklore truth bomb: “Traditional” does not mean “how things have always been done” or “the old(est) way of doing things.” Tradition is constantly evolving, constantly being invented anew to stay relevant and alive. It’s the tension between continuity and change, to paraphrase folklorist Barre Toelken.

As we said in a previous post on this topic, folklorists don’t judge folklore based on its age or pedigree. Instead, we care if it brings people together or means something to them or helps them communicate who they are.

We tend to see the same kinds of St. Patrick’s Day posts each year from the kinds of circles we run around in. People sharing the snakes = pagans idea, people debunking the snakes = pagans idea, people bemoaning the fact that St. Patrick gets all the attention over St. Gertrude, people who just want to drink, and the people who scold them about “ignoring tradition,” etc. etc. etc.

So here’s our piece: If no one is getting hurt, just let the people have their traditions. Don’t harsh someone’s happy. None of this stuff is any more “authentic” than anything else. Most of the time, we cannot possibly know what the “real” (i.e. oldest) tradition was, because that’s the tricky thing about oral tradition – it’s oral and rarely written down. If you’re out there engaging with some kind of folklore, some kind of tradition, we salute you and allow you into the “real folklore” club. We love that you’re out there in your green hat, wearing your snake necklace, proudly taking your cat on a walk, listening to Dropkick Murphys, and/or drinking too many pints of beer at your local “authentic” Irish pub.

To be clear, we’re not advocating for spreading misinformation here. And some of the stuff we see that’s chronically shared around St. Patrick’s Day is, indeed, factually wrong. What we are trying to point out is the tendency to try to one-up each other around this holiday: to dig deep for the most old/ obscure/ edgy meme and then to claim that this is actually the “origin” or “real” point of the holiday. And that is a fundamentally anti-folklore project. Legends (like the ones that St. Patrick’s Day is rooted in) do not mean only one thing, and customs (which are part of what people do on holidays) are varied. 

Folklorists are interested in the variations, in what actual people do to celebrate.

To do otherwise is to miss the forest by arguing about what the first tree in it was.

This internet meme fighting completely misses that, while also proliferating a lot of wildly inaccurate stuff. So, like, no, the historical St. Patrick did NOT drive the snake-pagans out of Ireland. (But, as folklorists, we might ask WHY this particular story is getting so much traction, even though it’s not true. #thinklikeafolklorist)   

Okay, that’s our soapbox for today (or yesterday, since this is going out the day after St. Patrick’s Day.) 

Cheers to you, your cat, and your traditions!