The European Folk Revival of the mid- to late eighteenth century – the rediscovery, revaluation and emulation of the ancient songs and stories of primitive people – is a literary-cultural phenomenon which had huge consequences. This was a fashionable enthusiasm of a late or post-Enlightenment intelligentsia and reading public which reverberated round the European continent and beyond in the 150 years that followed, not just transforming the forms and subject-matters of poetry, fiction, music and other arts, but also profoundly conditioning the political domain, as it supplied the cultural material – mythologies, originary stories, vernacular traditions – that sustained the great revolutionary ideologies of the nineteenth century. First, Romantics and pre-Romantics articulated their sense of the inadequacy of cosmopolitan rationalism by espousing the cultural productions of ordinary (uneducated, rural) people as repositories of pre-rational truth and authentic experience. Then the nostalgic imitation, collection and study of folksong, folktale, folk custom and folk belief which this engendered became a process of linguistic, historical and mythical identity-formation with practical consequences, as the new nationalism which increasingly destabilised the European political order over the course of the nineteenth century gained its legitimacy from such activity. And at the same time, radical plebeian movements from French Revolutionary times onwards found sustenance in evidence of the cultural autonomy and superiority of ordinary people, in customs and festivals, songs and story-telling. Even if nineteenth-century socialism did not generally seek to root itself in resuscitated systems of myth, its mythologisation of the proletariat had a related intellectual impetus.