SOURCE: Simpson, Jacqueline. “‘The Rules of Folklore’ in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James.” Folklore 108 (1997): 9-18.

In the following essay, Simpson evaluates the impact of English folklore and oral storytelling traditions on M. R. James' ghost stories.

When Dr Montague Rhodes James of King's College, Cambridge, published in 1904 the first volume of the elegant but alarming tales with which his name is now always associated, he called it Ghost Stories of an Antiquary; in 1911 he followed it with More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. The word “antiquary” already had an old-fashioned charm about it, and was appropriate for a scholar whose work revolved round medieval manuscripts, biblical Apocrypha, library catalogues, church iconography and the like.¹ But he was something of a folklorist too (more so than his self-deprecating remarks on the topic imply), with a particular interest in the development and persistence of local legends and historical...