Culture · 6 pages · 12 min
How folklore travels
Folklore moves by retelling, and each new telling can change the local details.
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From the opening
Folklore travels when a story, song, joke, or custom is learned by new people and performed again somewhere else. The thing that moves is a memorable pattern, so the journey does not require a single author or a shipment of printed books. The opening covers a pattern moves, not a sealed book, tale types and local swaps, and similarity alone is not travel.
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Inside
- A pattern moves, not a sealed book
- Tale types and local swaps
- Similarity alone is not travel
- Print and speech feed each other
- Where the idea stops applying
- A distinction worth keeping
Sources
- The Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale-type index
- The historic-geographic method in folklore research