With the death, in November 2023, of Emeritus Professor William Francis (Will) Ryan, The Folklore Society has lost a cherished former President and officer, a wise editorial adviser, and a longstanding supporter. He served as our Honorary Librarian from 1999 to 2002, as President from 2005 to 2008, as Vice-President from 2008 to 2014 (‘I didn’t realize it was a nine-year sentence’, he grumped while happily accepting the Vice-Presidency), continued as a Council member and chair of the FLS Library Working Party until 2017, and donated to the society until the very end.
Born in 1937 in London, Will was sent to stay during World War II with relatives in Clontarf, a suburb of Dublin, where, he later told Professor Patricia Lysaght, an old sword was dug up in the back garden and where, according to Will’s widow Professor Janet Hartley, it was rumoured that Czarist jewels had been hidden in a house there, allegedly given by the Bolsheviks in return for loans.
He was taught some Russian at Bromley Grammar School for Boys, but then was trained as a Russian interpreter during National Service in the Royal Navy, which inspired his interest in the history of navigation. He then studied Russian and French at Oxford. That was followed by doctoral studies, as part of which he spent a year in Leningrad, during the Cuban missile crisis, when he was still technically in the British naval reserve. In 1970, he completed his DPhil on ‘Astronomical and Astrological Terminology in Old Russian Literature’. His first position was as an editor for the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary followed by a post as Assistant Curator at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. From 1967 to 1976, he taught Russian language and palaeography at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London (now part of University College London).
In 1976, he was appointed Academic Librarian at The Warburg Institute, and later said that he had been pleased he could answer ‘yes’ when asked during the interview by Sir Ernst Gombrich, ‘can you cast a horoscope?’ He stayed in this post until he retired in 2002, noting in his retirement speech that ‘only one of my … trainees [Janet] married me—the others went on to better things’. Library colleagues recall him eagerly opening parcels of new books, announcing ‘it’s a bit like Christmas every day here’ (in retirement, he would be Santa Claus every year for the local Rotary Club and for all the family). Or, on days when he was less impressed by the package contents, pronouncing, ‘most books should be written as articles, and most articles shouldn’t be written at all’. Many academic colleagues, students, and scholars remember how helpful and kind he was in supporting their research, generously offering the fruits of his own research and showing a keen interest and curiosity in their work.
His many publications bear witness to his wide-ranging and eclectic interests, including magic, divination, and science in medieval and modern Russia; early scientific instruments; early navigation; medieval and early modern travel writings (he served as President of the Hakluyt Society 2008–11, and then Vice-President, and was the society’s series editor for many years). A bibliography of seventy-four of his publications was included, along with a biographical introduction, in a festschrift in his honour in 2021: Magic, Texts and Travel: Homage to a Scholar, Will Ryan, edited by Janet Hartley and Denis Shaw.
Although he wrote of his ‘rather peripheral status in folklore studies’, and his longstanding friend and colleague Dr Faith Wigzell remarked that Will was little concerned with oral history, he did profess an interest in ‘popular antiquities’ and folklore was also part of his remit as Librarian of The Warburg Institute, which has significant holdings on the subject. The founder, Aby Warburg, considered folklore to be an area worthy of study—and magic even more so.
In 1999, after more than thirty years of meticulous research, Will Ryan published The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (Penn State University Press, 1999), a rich and scholarly treasury of analysis of material (most of it not otherwise available in English) on Russian magical traditions and divinatory practices, and described by Professor Eva Pócs as ‘The most thorough and detailed study to date on the magic and divination of Russian and Eastern Slav peoples’ (review in Folklore 112, no. 2 [2001]: 238).
The following year (2000), he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 2007, largely in recognition of The Bathhouse at Midnight, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2005, he gave the British Library’s Panizzi Lectures, taking as his subject William R. S. Ralston, one of the original founders in 1878, and sometime Vice-President, of The Folklore Society. As Will wrote later, Ralston ‘was, as I have been for much of my working life, a bearded librarian, and a writer on Russia who specialised in its early history and its popular belief, tales, songs, and customs, including both games and magic’ (Ryan, lecture in Folklore 119, no. 1 [2008]: 1). The lectures were published as W. F. Ryan, Russian Magic at the British Library: Books, Manuscripts, Scholars, Travellers [Panizzi Lectures, 2005] (British Library, 2006). Will gave two Presidential Addresses to The Folklore Society, in 2007 and 2008, the first on magic and divinatory games in Russia, and the second on Ralston and the Russian folktale. These were published in Folklore (volumes 119, no. 1 [2008] and 120, no. 2 [2009]), in addition to many book reviews he wrote for the journal.
A devout Catholic, Will’s interest in the history of magic was purely intellectual. He viewed the Warburg Institute’s Aleister Crowley collection and Frieda Harris tarot paintings as something of a nuisance, and did his best to deter visitors who were less interested in studying the history of these materials than in handling them to ‘absorb the aura’ from their connection to ‘The Great Beast’ (Crowley). One such reader, whom Will had to remove from the library for defacing papers, used to phone him up and mumble curses; in response, Will read him a curse in Church Slavonic which, he informed him, would make him impotent. He never heard from him again.
Being a very practical person, he was always ready to roll up his sleeves and fix things in the library himself rather than calling on maintenance services, prompting one colleague to affectionately nickname him ‘the Black and Decker Kid’. The Folklore Society also benefited greatly from Will’s ability to fix things: he helped with our information technology and library needs, was unstinting in sharing his vast experience and skills in editing and publishing, and it was thanks to his efforts that The Folklore Society’s office and a decent selection of our library’s reference books found a happy home at the Warburg Institute from 2000 to 2019.
Will enthusiastically attended Folklore Society events and conferences, and represented the society at many international events, including the Third International Conference on Charms, Charmers and Charming in Pécs, Hungary, 2007. Professor Marion Bowman recalls that, as Folklore Society Vice-President and President, respectively, she and Will went to several international folklore conferences in Europe, where they were both moved and humbled by the warm reception they received, by the respect the society still commanded, and by how much they were appreciated as a mark of the society’s interest in being part of a broader European folklore scene.
He was quietly very funny too, and many a dull committee meeting was relieved by a softly-spoken quick witticism from Will. One time, in pre-Internet days, he was at The Folklore Society office when someone phoned asking for the words for ‘Sonia Snell’. Not knowing it myself, I asked Will whether he had come across it: steepling his fingers in his characteristic style, he murmured, with a twinkle in his eye: ‘Frequently … but never framed’.
The Folklore Society owes a great deal to Will Ryan, a generous scholar and charming gentleman.
Note
Information about Will’s festschrift can be seen online: https://www.sgecr.co.uk/festschrift-ryan.html. There is also a list of many of his publications, works he edited, and editorial boards on which he sat on the website of The Warburg Institute: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/people/w-f-ryan.
A brief report on the 2007 Charms and Charming conference is on The Folklore Society’s website: https://folklore-society.com/event/charms-charmers-and-charming-2.
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Notes on contributors
Caroline Oates
Dr Caroline Oates is the Librarian of The Folklore Society; she studied, worked as assistant librarian, and then as language tutor at The Warburg Institute from 1979 to 2020.