General Information:
Title: Running Around the Bonfire
Form of Folklore: Customary, bonfire festival
Language: English
Place of Origin: Hanover, NH, United States
Informant: H.A.
Date Collected: November 1st, 2021

Informant Data: 
H.A. is a 21-year-old member of the Dartmouth class of 2022. He studies neuroscience and wants to be on the cutting edge of mental health research, eventually pursuing a PhD. He was born in San Francisco, but moved to Washington DC in 2004. At Dartmouth, H.A. is the co-founder of the recently approved Dartmouth Undergraduate Psychedelic Society, and otherwise pursues neuroscience research with mice. In his free-time, H.A. enjoys reading scientific articles, listening to scientific podcasts, cooking, and spending time with friends. 

Contextual Data: 
– Social Context: Every term Dartmouth has a ‘big weekend’ of celebrations, and in the fall this is ‘Homecoming Weekend’. While many instantiations of traditions are aimed at the freshmen during this weekend, the whole weekend stands as a yearly tradition for all students and a lot of alumni who will come back and visit for the weekend. The weekend features Dartmouth’s football team playing the ‘homecoming game’, and the school organizes parades, speeches, and a large bonfire that all alumni and students gather around. The bonfire itself is used as part of a freshman-specific tradition every year, where the freshmen class walks a lap around the fire in front of the audience. It is the first ‘big weekend’ that freshmen get to experience, and because they typically hear a lot about it from upperclassmen they often look very forward to it.
– Cultural Context: The bonfire, specifically, features a freshman specific tradition where the whole class walks a lap around the bonfire. Typically, they are heckled by upperclassmen who are watching the bonfire lap, and these upperclassmen were again heckled by their seniors when they were freshmen. Notably, Henry is a member of the class of 2022, the first class to participate in this tradition after Dartmouth updated the safety restrictions surrounding the event. The class of 2022 was the first class who was prohibited from running their lap around the fire and were instructed to only walk one lap. Past classes were both allowed to run around the fire, and they ran the same number of laps as their class year. The bonfire lap is a once-in-a-Dartmouth-career experience, and because all students have participated once it stands as a well cemented and anticipated tradition every year. 

Item: 
The homecoming bonfire is organized by the College, and it is built in the middle of the Dartmouth Green. The wooden panels are decorated by various student organizations, who send their freshmen members to paint a panel. The top of the wooden structure is decorated by wooden numerals of the graduating year of the freshmen. Surrounding the bonfire is a large audience of current students and alumni. While the fire burns on the Friday of homecoming, the freshman walk a lap around the fire and are heckled by upperclassmen. Various traditional heckles are yelled, like “you are the worst class ever” and “touch the fire”. The latter emerged a few years ago, when the school took strict action to ensure that students didn’t run close to the fire. 

Associated File:

Transcript: 
Collector: “What is your attitude towards Homecoming Weekend and the Bonfire tradition?” 

Informant: “I really enjoyed the bonfire tradition and generally thought it was a lot of fun. But I had heard a lot about the bonfire tradition from upperclassmen and I learned that we [the class of 2022] were the first class who only were allowed to walk one lap around the bonfire, instead of the traditional running the number of laps of your class year which all the students before us had done. I learned the school implemented this measure for safety reasons, but it sucked having to be the first class to experience it. It felt like a rupture in the lineage of Dartmouth student experiences that is passed down from one class to the next. To be on the other edge of that tradition break was an odd position and I was left always wondering what it would be like to run 22 laps and what I missed out on. I felt that I was getting a different experience than all the students who preceded me and had gotten the Dartmouth experience.”

Collector Comment:
As a fellow class of 2022, I felt very similarly about being the first class ever to only walk one lap around the bonfire. I remember a lot of upperclassmen commenting on how we were ‘missing out’ and ‘not getting the real experience’, and it made me feel slightly isolated from the Dartmouth experience, especially as this was my first term at Dartmouth.

Collected By:
Una Westvold
Oslo, Norway
Hanover, NH
Dartmouth College
RUSS 013
Fall 2021