FABLES
Definition:
1. A story of supernatural or marvelous happenings (as in legend, myth, or folklore).
2. A narration intended to enforce a useful truth, especially through the use of animals or personification.
Differs from folktales in that a moral is woven in story and explicitly formulated in the end.
Fables began in Greece with Aesop, emphasizing social interactions of humans, and morals to lend advice on the realities of life.
In the European Middle Ages, the fable gave way to the beast epic, an episodic animal story with heroes, villains, and victims—parodying the true epic grandeur.
The 19th century fable found a new audience among children, featuring authors like Beatrix Potter (Tales of Peter Rabbit), Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book), Hans Christian Anderson (“The Silver Skates”), and Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking Glass).
FOLKLORE
Definition:
1. The sum total of traditionally derived and orally transmitted literature, culture, and customs of subcultures. Often, it is restricted to oral tradition.
Folklore material can include fairy tales, folktales, oral epics, songs, riddles, and proverbs.
Folklore studies began in early 19th century by studying cultural groups predominantly illiterate and relatively untouched by modern ways, such as Gypsies.
The aim was to trace preserved archaic customs and beliefs to discover the history of human thought.
In Germany, Brothers Grimm used folklore to illuminate Germanic religion of the Dark Ages.
The nature is often nationalistic because folklore of a group reinforced its ethnic identity, political independence, and national unity.
After WWII, folklore emphasis shifted from past to present meanings in effort to embody a culture by language, locale, occupation, age, and ethnic origins.
FOLKTALES
Definition:
1. A characteristically anonymous, timeless, and placeless tale circulated orally among a people.
Folktales are universal. Both very simple stories and complex tales share the basic elements of storyteller and audience are universal in history.
It travels with great ease through language boundaries because it is characterized as a simple formula.
Were hard to distinguish from myths with tales of tricksters and heroes in relation to mortals and gods.
Animals abound in natural and anthropomorphized form.
Adventure stories, exaggerations, marvels, and otherworld journeys among humans and animal are common.
LEGENDS
Definitions:
1. The story of the life of a saint, or collection of such stories.
2. A story coming down from the past; one handed down from early times by tradition and regarded as historical—although not entirely verifiable. Also, a total body of such traditions, particularly among a group of people or clans.
3. A popular myth usually of current or recent origin.
4. The subject of a legend, or the person around whom these traditions have grown. Person usually possess qualities that a partly real and partly mythical.
Some legends are unique to the person they are attached to.
· Ex) George Washington chopping down the cherry tree.
Many local legends are actually well-known folktales that have become specific to a person or place.
· Ex) The widely distributed folktale of an marksman who if forced to shoot an apple or hazelnut from his son’ s head has become associated with the Swiss hero William Tell.
MYTHS
Definition:
1. Usually a traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of a worldview of a people or a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon.
2. The whole body of the myth.
Myths relate to paradigmatic events, conditions, and deeds of gods or superhuman being that are outside of ordinary human life and yet basic to it.
These extraordinary events are set in a time altogether different from historical time, of ten at the beginning of creation or prehistory.
Tales of origins or causes explain various aspects of nature or human life and society. Myths also fulfill common social functions.
Fairy tales deal with extraordinary beings and events, but lack the authority of myth.
Epics claim authority and truth, but reflect specific historical settings.
The modern study of myth arose in with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century, but interpretations date much earlier.
The influence of philosophy in ancient Greece led to allegorical views or historical reductionism of Euhemerus, who believed that gods of myth were originally great people.
Structuralists, such as French social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, compared formal relationships and patterns in myths throughout the world.
Sigmund Freud put forward the idea that symbolic communication does not depend on cultural history alone but also on the workings of the human psyche—where the myth expresses repressed ideas.
Carl Jung maintained the collective unconscious and the archetypes, often encoded in myths, arise out of it.