Folklore Tapes: Theo Brown & The Folklore of Dartmoor

Event information

Theo Brown and the Folklore of Dartmoor explores the stories and folk-beliefs of seven Dartmoor villages through experiments in sound and vision. It also celebrates the life of the late folklorist and artist Theo Brown, whose publications, papers and woodcuts have lain dormant in the archives at Exeter University since her death in 1993. Using Brown's unpublished research, Ian Humberstone and David Chatton Barker have crafted an audio-visual retelling of Dartmoor folklore grounded in the moor's topography, history and folk-culture.

Theo Brown was an important and much maligned figure within twentieth-century folkloristics, who documented the arcane tales and traditions of her native Devon through first-hand accounts, often, in her younger years, camping out on the county’s waysides to do so. Brown later rose to prominence within the Folklore Society, authoring several well received monographs and papers. However, she was not afforded the full credit due her endeavours by the wider academic community, who derided both her lack of formal training and the singular dedication with which she pursued her often esoteric subjects. Brown was, in this way, a comparable figure to Delia Derbyshire, Lotte Reiniger and Vera Chytilová: a pioneering spirit working within a field dominated by grey-faced men in stiff collars.