FEAR, HONOUR AND SHAME. HORROR FICTIONS OF THE 1950s AND 1960s Mare Kõiva Abstract The article analyses horror stories and legends about a sausage factories and about a woman who killed her children at her lover's insistence, told in a small Estonian town in the 1950s and 1960s. Presenting one's self and memories is often a strategy for altering data. Certain events or stereotypic stories of fear, dishonouring or shame can be told as first-person narratives on the condition that these do not damage the person's honour. Fear, hon- our and shame are terms openly or implicitly discussed in many forms of verbal art, and are also present in personal narratives. Keywords: Fear, shame, honour, personal experience narratives, social- ism, Poltsamaa Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part: there all the honor lies. Alexander Pope Fear, honour and shame are terms openly or implicitly discussed in many forms of verbal art and can be also met in personal narratives. These same terms are related to stereotypic beliefs and attitudes, some of which we still meet in everyday expres- sions today. Honour and shame, and also fear, are related to un- written and written legal norms in a community, while the first two are simultaneously important bonds linking the individual to the community, shaping his image and thus influencing his career. In the 1990s I became interested in children's horror stories. Some of these stories had left a deep impression on me in my childhood, comparable to the impression their childhood mon- sters had left on the characters of the short story Ghost no. 5. At the time I was interested in the structure and characters of chil- dren's stories, how stable or labile the stories were, but the sto- ries also enchanted me with their playfulness and the profound way in which they differed from adults' horror stories of similar content - though the adults' stories were based on profound be- lief (Koiva 1998, see also Pakalns 1995, 2004). Later, having stud- ied urban legends, personal narratives, memoirs from Soviet Es- tonia, I have come to realise that presenting one's self and memo-
Mare Kõiva Folklore 29 ries are often a strategy for altering data. It is very common that variations are based on different experiences and there are many possible ways of recalling or recounting an experience. In the present article will discuss horror stories told in a small town in the 1950s and 1960s: first of all, the expression of fears concerning personal existence in stories and a series of stories about a woman who killed her children at her lover's insistence, as well as stories about blood takers and sausage makers. For source material, I have used records of the Estonian Folklore Archives, memoirs by the local priest Herbert Kuurme (Kuurme 2001 a, b), personal interviews from more recent times and per- sonal memories. I have attempted to choose locations that are known to me from my friends or that I have been