Dartmouth College
Vampires, Witches and Firebirds
Victoria Somoff, Mikhail Gronas
Spring 2016
Folklore Collection Project
When the four of us first met to try and decide what we wanted to do for this project, the first thing we thought to do was something that we were close to, something that we were all interested in. And seeing as we all played a sport here at Dartmouth, we thought there was no better option than to collect folklore on athletic teams here at the college. So, we decided on Dartmouth Athletics Folklore. We thought this could be something special because of how folklore within people’s teams can contribute to a large majority of the memories people will have when they leave here. In addition, we were very interested to see if there were similar traditions and folklore between teams, or if each team would have drastically different ideas and versions of their own folklore.
To try and get the best grasp of different folklore between the teams here at Dartmouth, we decided that we should try and talk to different teams, as to try to avoid similarities. Because of this, we decided to talk to women’s lacrosse, football, women’s volleyball, sailing, and women’s hockey.
This ended up being a very intriguing process for all of us, as we got to see a side of other Dartmouth athletic teams that we did not know about before, and this introduced us to many kinds of folkloric things that we did not even know existed