folklore essay

Definition of Folklore

Folklore is a collection of fictional stories about animals and people, of cultural myths , jokes, songs, tales, and even quotes. It is a description of culture, which has been passed down verbally from generation to generation, though many are now in written form. Folklore is also known as “folk literature,” or “oral traditions.”

Folklore depicts the way main characters manage their everyday life events, including conflicts or crises. Simply, folk literature is about individual experiences from a particular society. The study of folk tradition and knowledge is called folkloristics. Although some folklores depict universal truths, unfounded beliefs and superstitions are also basic elements of folklore tradition.

Types of Folklore

Following are the major forms of folklore:

Fairy Tales
Folk dramas
Proverbs , charms, and riddles
Use of Folklore by Children

Examples of Folklore in Literature

Example #1: rudyard kipling.

Rudyard Kipling was keenly interested in folklore, as he has written many English works based on folklore such as, Rewards and Fairies and Puck of Pook’s Hill . His experiences in Indian environment have led him to create several works about Indian themes and tradition. Since Kipling has lived a great deal of life in Indian regions, he was much familiar with the Indian languages.

Kipling’s popular work, The Jungle Book , consists of plenty of stories about traditional folktales. He also has Indian themes in his work, Just So Stories, in which he has given many characters recognizable names related to Indian languages. Helen Bannerman has also penned an Indian themed folktale, Little Black Sambo, during the same period.

Example #2: Patrick Henry

Patrick Henry was a politician, attorney and planter, who gained popularity as an orator when Americans were struggling for independence. He is well known for his speech in the House of Burgesses in 1775 in the church of Saint Joseph. The House was undecided about whether they need to mobilize and take military action against encroaching military forces of England. Henry gave his arguments in favor of American forces’ mobilization. After forty-two years, William Wirt, Henry’s first biographer, working from different oral histories and stories, reconstructed the sayings of Henry, outlining the folk traditions he inherited and passed on.

Example #3: A. K. Ramanujan

A. K. Ramanujan has written a lot about context sensitivity as a theme in many cultural essays, classical poetry, and Indian folklore. For example, in his works Three Hundred Ramayanas, and Where Mirrors are Windows , he talks about intertextual quality of written and oral Indian literature. His popular essay , Where Mirrors Are Windows: Toward an Anthology of Reflections, and commentaries done on Indian folktales, including Oral Tales from Twenty Indian Languages, and The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology, Present Perfect examples of Indian folk literature studies.

Example #4: Alan Garner

Alan Garner is a renowned English novelist popular for writing fantasy tales and retellings of traditional English folk tales. His works are mainly rooted in history, landscape, and folklore of his native country Cheshire. One of such children’s novels is, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley , which took a local legend from The Wizard of the Edge , and described landscapes and folklore of neighboring Alderley Edge, where Alan had grown up. The novel is set in Alderley Edge in Cheshire and Macclesfield. This is a very good example of the use of folktales in literature.

Function of Folklore

The main purpose of folklore is to convey a moral lesson and present useful information and everyday life lessons in an easy way for the common people to understand. Folk tales sugarcoat the lessons of hard life in order to give the audience pointers about how they should behave. It is one of the best mediums to pass on living culture or traditions to future generations.

Currently, many forms of folk literature have been transformed into books and manuscripts, which we see in the forms of novels, histories, dramas, stories, lyric poems, and sermons. Folk literature is, however, not merely a carrier of cultural values; rather, it is also an expression of self-reflection. It serves as a platform to hold high moral ground without any relevance to present day reality. Instead, writers use it as a commentary or satire on current political and social reality. In the modern academic world, folklores and folktales are studied to understand ancient literature and civilizations.

Cultural Studies: What is Folklore? Essay

Folklore is defined variously, with a majority of people assuming that it entails the study of the culture and traditions of certain groups. In the real sense, it includes the analysis of people’s ways of life, their traditions, customs, and heritage. Each group has a special culture that characterizes it and makes it different from the rest, meaning that the study of folklore applies to every ethnic group.

It is advisable that individual views his or her culture objectively if a clear picture and meaning are to be attached to it. In many cases, folklores would be understood to mean the common activities and concerns of a group, but not the famous achievements; hence, many individuals believe that folklores are not important.

Historians encourage people to take a closer look at their folklores, as they have the capacity of educating them implying that it is something that can help the young generation in developing their history, studying their background, and understanding the past events.

In simple terms, folklore is defined as common creativity of humankind, which entails some of how people tend to be creative, generate knowledge, and study culture in society. Human beings are different from other species in the sense that they express themselves in symbolic ways;. Hence, they interpret things through signs. Through folklore, the special talents that people possess in society are understood.

Based on this, it is noted that folklores comprise of the five major areas, including verbal, musical, ritual, material, and belief. Verbal folklore includes how a group of people uses language in passing information, including storytelling. Musical folklore entails the use of songs and rhythms, such as recitation of verses. When people take part in communal celebrations, ritual folklore is said to have taken place.

Since human beings are believed to be toolmakers, the study of material folklore is imperative. Each community can manipulate nature to fulfill its interests and goals. The last category of folklore, belief, is different from the rest, as it mainly deals with how people view the world. It is noted that each community perceives the world changed and has a different orientation.

Based on this, belief folklore is not creative as compared to other forms of folklore. What people think and believe is always real as opposed to the imaginary world. The belief system is majorly shaped by experiences and people’s culture, which varies from one community to the other.

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The Idea of Folklore: An Essay

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The concept of folklore emerged in Europe midway in the nineteenth century. Originally it connoted tradition, ancient customs and surviving festivals, old ditties and dateless ballads, archaic myths, legends and fables, and timeless tales and proverbs. As these narratives rarely stood the tests of common sense and experience, folklore also implied irrationality: beliefs in ghosts and demons, fairies and goblins, sprites and spirits; it referred to credence in omens, amulets, and talismans. From the perspective of the urbane literati, who conceived the idea of folklore, these two attributes of traditionality and irrationality could pertain only to peasant or primitive societies. Hence they attributed to folklore a third quality: rurality. The countryside and the open space of wilderness was folklore's proper breeding ground. Man's close contact with nature in villages and hunting bands was considered the ultimate source of his myth and poetry. As an outgrowth of the human experience with nature, folklore itself was thought to be a natural expression of man before city, commerce, civilization, and culture contaminated the purity of his life.

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