Fakelore is inauthentic, manufactured folklore which is created in the hope that it will be accepted as genuine and/or legitimate. The term was coined in 1950 by the folklorist Richard Dorson to describe material like the Paul Bunyan tales. Though they were marketed as campfire stories that loggers passed down, they were created by professional writers in the employ of a lumber company .

Urban myths are sometimes called fakelore, though the 'fake' is here taken as a reference to the unreality of the events described and not to an intent to fabricate.

Historical Fakelore

• One common story attributed to a young George Washington is generally now recognized as fakelore. Washington is said to have cut down a cherry tree, then admitted to the act, stating, "I cannot tell a lie." This is still taught in many American schools despite long consensus amongst historians that the tale is fakelore meant to instill patriotism and good behaviour in children.

• There exists a claim that the abusive term faggot for a homosexual man derives from the homosexual victims of Inquisition burnings being named after the faggots of wood piled under them. While homosexuals were burned by the Inquisition and victims at that time were sometimes referred to as 'faggots' there are no known examples of the term being applied exclusively to homosexuals before the early 20th century. The origin of the American slang term remains disputed with possible derivations from the aforementioned burning, 'faggot' as a term for a shrewish woman or an underclassmen required to run errands for a senior morphing into a reference to homosexuals, and several other unproven theories. .

Christian fakelore

Christianity has also been subject to various similarly constructed tales, especially during times of religious conflict. Some examples

• Easter has its detractors within Christianity. The majority of the Christian fakelore regarding Easter erroneously associates the holiday with the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, based on a superficial similarity between her name and the holiday's. This fakelore claims that Easter was chosen in spring to coincide with a pagan fertility celebration and attributes all Easter customs to that celebration. In the countries where Easter celebrations originated (the Levant and Mediterranean countries), the holiday is not known as "Easter". Instead, it is known by some variant of the word "Pascha" (Passover). The Jewish Passover is also a spring festival, and the celebration of Easter in the spring is a continuation of the older Jewish custom.

• Alexander Hislop's The Two Babylons, which constructs an elaborate argument based on nineteenth century interpretations of classical mythology to demonstrate that Nimrod and Semiramis were the prototypes and founders of every non-Christian mythology. Hislop wished to show, first, that every religion other than Protestant Christianity was attributable to a diabolical conspiracy; second, to attempt to reconcile the known diversity of human myths and pagan religions with the creationist account of early monotheism and two human ancestors who knew the God who made them; and most importantly, to discredit the Roman Catholic Church by claiming that its Mass, its saints, and veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary perpetuated the rites of Nimrod and Semiramis.

• Similar anti-Catholic fictions were produced during the nineteenth century, including the Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel-Dieu Nunnery by Maria Monk, and Charles Chiniquy's 50 Years in the Church of Rome.

• Roman Catholicism has not been immune to the construction of fakelore. In 1969, the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church was revised. In this revision, many well known saints were dropped from the list of saints held up for veneration by the Roman Catholic Church, and their saint's days demoted to "purely
  
  
  
  local observances," on the grounds that there was no convincing evidence that they had ever existed. Among the saints dropped in this reform were popular ones such as Catherine of Alexandria, Margaret of Antioch, and Christopher. (It is widely but erroneously believed that George was also removed from the calendar. Today, his memorial is celebrated on April 23, as can be seen by consulting any modern day missal or breviary.) The memorial of St. Catherine of Alexandria on November 25 was restored to the Calendar in 2005.

• The veneration of relics has given rise to many charges that at least for early saints, many of the relics were inauthentic. The authenticity of many of these relics, and the tendency to move, and even to break up and distribute the bodies of venerated persons, has given rise to much controversy; some popular saints have duplicate body parts claimed to be in different locations.

• Apocryphal Christian literature exists that purports to fill in perceived gaps of the canonical Gospels with pious additions. Some of these texts, like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, portray Jesus as animating clay models of birds; or killing playmates in a fit of pique and then reviving them, or killing people who accidentally touched him — all conceits worthy of a Ray Bradbury story.

Neopagan Fakelore

The neopagan movement has seen several instances of fakelore:

• An example of neopagan fakelore is the account of how the square dance resulted from an imposition of Puritan repressive values on the witches' circle dance. This serves the dual purpose of characterising the Puritans as censorious and joyless "squares" while perpetuating the idea that the witches' traditions were able to survive under different guises.

• In recent years, the familiar red and white colours of Santa Claus have been erroneously attributed to Coca-Cola, which popularised the image rather than creating it . Neopagan fakelore attributes these colours either to 'blood on the snow' or to an alleged shamanic practice in which reindeer would be skinned and their hide worn inside out, thus creating a red garment with white fringes. A neopagan monologue broadcast on radio, The Mendip Shaman, popularised this belief . As the characteristic red and white Santa only evolved in the 1920s, attributing these colours to shamans skinning reindeer is clearly inaccurate.

• The name Eostre is sometimes mistakenly held to be the origin of the word oestrogen, perhaps following a wilful association of Easter eggs with human egg cells. In actuality, the term is known with certainty to be derived from the greek 'oistros', originally meaning 'gadfly' but evolving into a description of frenzied desire (cf. Plato's Republic, "..driven and drawn by the gadfly of desire..").

• One of the myths which links Eostre to the Easter Bunny might illustrate how some neopagan fakelore works backwards from a presumed origin. There is little historical evidence of a goddess named 'Eostre' or 'Ostara', but the Venerable Bede attested to her past worship and Jakob Grimm claimed to have found evidence of her in German traditions. A myth in which she transforms her pet bird into a rabbit that then lays eggs for children is of uncertain ancestry, but has been reported since at least 1990 (Sarah Ban Breathnach, 'Nostalgic Suggestions for Re-Creating the Family Celebrations and Seasonal Pastimes of the Victorian Home'). Some have suggested that this myth and another where Eostre was described as having the head of a hare, even though there are no images of animal-headed deities in Anglo-Saxon art, were invented recently and circulated among neopagans as the 'real origin' of Easter.

See also

• Christian mythology
• Folk etymology

References

• Liturgia Horarum, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000.
• Textus Inserendi, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005.