In Chapter 4 of this book, Sarah Dunnigan quotes the English philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood on the enchantments of fairy- and folk-lore: ‘our national fairy tales are actual surviving fragments of our national youth and by steeping ourselves in them we live that youth over and over again’. Fairy tales and the lore of the folk express wholeness and unity, and are thus representative of the continuity of the self into adulthood and the re-enactment of childhood. The ‘steeping’ of self and society in the national tale enables the reliving of ‘national youth’, and is a vital part of how societies conceive of themselves in history as well as poetry, psychic reminders of survival and continuity.

Collingwood was writing in the 1930s about the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and more generally on what we in our introduction to this book have called the ‘Germano-British’ basis of European folk revivals after Macpherson and Herder. He was also writing in a decade which brought to crisis the attempts of various European nationalisms to authenticate ideologies of national origins in the singularities of the differing lore of their differing folk. For Collingwood these were among the ideas which animated the ‘new barbarians’. His editor, Philip Smallwood, then asks why a respected archaeologist, classicist and aesthetician would write about folklore in this decade; but by the beginning of the 1940s one answer was clear.