Traditional sayings about the weather,
wise or otherwise, have commonly but wrongly been considered
proverbs by folklorists for more than a century. A host of
titles attests to the purported existence of weather
proverbs. Reinsberg-Düringsfeld published Das Wetter
im Sprichwort in 1864; Richard Inwards, Weather Lore:
A Collection of Proverbs, Sayings and Rules Concerning the
Weather appeared in 1869; and Rev. Charles Swaison, A
Handbook of Weather Folk-Lore: Being A Collection of
Proverbial Sayings in Various Languages Relating to the
Weather in 1873. Other sources include C. W. Empson,
"Weather Proverbs and Sayings Not Contained in Inwards' or
Swainson's Books," Folklore Record 4 (1881), 126-132;
Alexis Yermoloff's comprehensive Die landwirtschaftliche
Volksweisheit in Sprichwörtern, Redensarten und
Wetterregeln (1905); and William J. Humphreys, Weather Proverbs and Paradoxes (1923).
Standard surveys of the proverb genre
include mention of so-called weather proverbs. F. Edward
Hulme concluded his Proverb Lore (1902) with a
discussion of weather proverbs (pp. 264-269); Archer Taylor
devotes a substantial section of The Proverb (1931)
to weather proverbs (pp. 109-121); Röhrich and Mieder
in Sprichwort (1977) list "Wettersprichwort
(Bauern-regel)" as their first example of special forms of
proverbs (pp. 7-10). Articles on weather proverbs have even
appeared in Proverbium, e.g., Nai-tung Ting, "Chinese
Weather Proverbs," Proverbium 18 (1972), 649-655
which would suggest at least tacit acceptance of this
subgeneric category. Wolfgang Mieder's superb International Proverb Scholarship (1982) contains
more than forty references to collections or discussions of
weather proverbs.
From this admittedly cursory
bibliographical survey, one can safely surmise that 'weather
proverbs' constitute a legitimate subtype of the proverb
genre and further that the study of them falls appropriately
under the rubric of paremiology. I believe this is a generic
error and that what are commonly called weather proverbs are
nothing more than superstitions. What has tended to confuse
folklorists is that whereas superstitions are more often
than not free phrase, weather superstitions frequently occur
in rhymed fixed-phrase form. In other words, they are
superstitions with the textural features of proverbs (and
riddles). It is likely that these textural features are
present for mnemonic purposes. It is easier to remember a
fact if it is couched in rhyme. The point, however, is that
a rhymed superstition is still a superstition, not a
proverb.
Let us take a representative instance.
There is a venerable folk belief that a red sky in the
evening signals fair weather to follow while a red sky in
the morning predicts bad weather. Two distinct 'proverbs'
based on this belief are to be found in The Oxford
Dictionary of English Proverbs, Third Edition (1970).
They are: Sky red in the morning is a sailor's (shepherd's)
warning; sky red at night is the sailor's (shepherd's)
delight. Evening red and morning grey help the traveller on
his way; evening grey and morning red bring down rain upon
his head.
This is an old tradition going back as
many have observed to a New Testament version (Matthew
16:2-3): "When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair
weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be
foul weather today: for the sky is red and lowering." The
Biblical text provides a useful terminus ante quem for this
belief which is one of the numerous weather sayings which
has been tested by meteorologists and found to be relatively
accurate.1
What this means is that there are
numerous texts included in the Dictionary of English
Proverbs, and no doubt other standard collections of
proverbs as well, which do not belong to the proverb genre
at all. For example, in England, in the spring of 1983, I
collected a number of versions of "One for sorrow, two for
joy; three for a girl, four for a boy" which is allegedly
recited upon sighting one or more magpies. A longer form is
found in the Dictionary of English Proverbs which
begins "One (magpie) for sorrow; two for mirth; three for a
wedding: four for a birth..." A female informant explained
to me that inasmuch as magpies tended to cluster in pairs,
the rhyme had sexist overtones -- boys likely than girsl
(three magpies). The very structure of the rhyme would tend
to support such an assertion to the extent that sorrow and
girls are aligned in contrast to joys and boys. Whatever the
chauvinist implications of the text may be, it is clearly a
form of divination. Hence it belongs to the genre of
superstition (where there are many signs of whether a future
baby will be a boy or a girl). The fact that it is in rhyme
does not make it any the less a sign superstition. It is not
a proverb.
With similar reasoning, I would argue
that most of what proverb scholars have referred to as
'medical proverbs', e.g., An apple a day keeps the doctor
away,6 are simply rhymed folk medical superstitions. If A, then B.
If one eats an apple daily, one will be healthy. Finally, I
do not really believe that the folk consider weather and
medical rules as proverbs. It is rather the folklorists who
have wrongly constructed such erroneous classificatory
categories. To the original question raised: Are weather
proverbs proverbs? I would say emphatically "No!"
NOTES
Previously published in
Proverbium 1 (1984), pp. 39-46.
Permission to publish this article granted by Proverbium
(Editor: Prof. Wolfgang Mieder, University of Vermont,
USA).
1 See, for example, Spencer Russell, "A
Red Sky at Night..." Meteorological Magazine, 61
(1926), 15-17, and Paul J. Marriott, Red Sky at Night,
Shepherd's Delight? Weather Lore of the English
Countryside (Oxford: Sheba Books, 1981), pp. 309-311.
For representative discussions of the scientific merit of
such weather signs, see Georges Tibau, "Zestig Vlaamse
weerspreuken onder de loep van de statistiek," Volkskunde 78 (1977), 33-59; and M. G. Wurtele, "Some
Thoughts on Weather Lore," Folklore 82 (1971),
292-303.
2 See R.-O Frick, "Le peuple et la
prévision du temps," Schweizerisches Archiv
für Volkskunde, 26 (1926), 1-21, 89-100, 171-188,
254-279. For the structural formula, see pp. 5-6. See also
Eleanor Anne Forster, The Proverb and Superstition
Defined. Diss. University of Pennsylvania, 1968.
3 For a discussion of the definition of
sign superstitions, see Alan Dundes, "Brown County
Superstitions," Midwest Folklore, 11 (1961), 25-56
(see esp. pp. 28-31). The theoretical portion of this essay
was reprinted in Alan Dundes, Analytic Essays in
Folklore (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 88-94.
4 Ronald Baker makes a similar case in
"'Hogs Are Playing with Sticks -- Bound to Be Bad Weather':
Folk Belief or Proverb?" Midwestern Journal of Language
and Folklore, 1 (1975): 65-67; reprinted in Readings
in American Folklore, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 199-202.
5 Marriott, op. cit., p. 111,
159, claims the saying is true "because at the end of March
and during April they arrive in ones and twos, only coming
in force from mid to late April."
6 This and other examples of medical
'proverbs' may be found in Archer Taylor, The Proverb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), pp.
121-129.
Alan Dundes
Department of Anthropology
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, California 94720
USA
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