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118-618: Scholars and folktale catalogues report variants of the tale type across Europe, the Middle East, and even India and Japan, although the number of brothers and their animal form may vary between tales. The tale was published by the Brothers Grimm in the first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1812, and substantially rewritten for the second edition in 1819. Their source is Wilhelm Grimm's friend and later wife Henriette Dorothea (Dortchen) Wild (1795–1867). A King gets lost in

236-469: A forest while hunting for game . An old witch promises to help the lost King get back home, on the condition that he marry her beautiful daughter. The King suspects the mysterious maiden to be wicked, but agrees to marry her. He has six sons and a daughter from his first marriage, however, and fears that the children will be abused by his new wife. So before the wedding , the King sends his children to

354-419: A "quantitative mining of the resulting archive, and extraction of distribution patterns in time and space". It is based on the assumption that every text artifact is a variant of the original text. As a proponent of this method, Walter Anderson proposed additionally a Law of Self-Correction, i.e. a feedback mechanism which would keep the variants closer to the original form. It was during the first decades of

472-458: A Linear World", Donald Fixico describes an alternate concept of time. "Indian thinking" involves "'seeing' things from a perspective emphasizing that circles and cycles are central to world and that all things are related within the Universe." He then suggests that "the concept of time for Indian people has been such a continuum that time becomes less relevant and the rotation of life or seasons of

590-547: A Polish tale collected in Kraków by Oskar Kolberg , O siedmiu braciach bocianach ("The Seven Stork Brothers"). The Hungarian tale A hét daru ("The Seven Cranes") attests the transformation of the brothers into cranes. The jackdaw transformation is attested in the Hungarian tale, A csóka lányok ("The Jackdaw Girls"), wherein a poor mother wishes her rambunctious twelve daughters would turn into jackdaws and fly away, which

708-621: A connection with the swan shirts of the swan maidens of the Volundarkvida . On his notes on Children of Lir tale, in his book More Celtic Fairy Tales , folklorist Joseph Jacobs wrote that the "well-known Continental folk-tale" of The Seven Swans (or Ravens) became connected to the medieval cycle of the Knight of the Swan . The tale type is said to be "widely recorded" in Europe and in

826-695: A context which is foreign to the original tradition." This definition, offered by the folklorist Hermann Bausinger, does not discount the validity of meaning expressed in these "second hand" traditions. Many Walt Disney films and products belong in this category of folklorism; fairy tales become animated film characters, stuffed animals and bed linens. These manifestations of folklore traditions have their own significance for their audience. Fakelore refers to artifacts which might be termed pseudo-folklore , manufactured items claiming to be traditional. The folklorist Richard Dorson coined this word, clarifying it in his book "Folklore and Fakelore". Current thinking within

944-461: A culture, not just the oral traditions. Folk process is used to describe the refinement and creative change of artifacts by community members within the folk tradition that defines the folk process. Professionals within this field, regardless of the other words they use, consider themselves to be folklorists. Other terms which might be confused with folklore are popular culture and vernacular culture . However, pop culture tends to be in demand for

1062-503: A different direction. Throughout the 19th century folklore had been tied to romantic ideals of the soul of the people, in which folk tales and folksongs recounted the lives and exploits of ethnic folk heroes. Folklore chronicled the mythical origins of different peoples across Europe and established the beginnings of national pride . By the first decade of the 20th century there were scholarly societies as well as individual folklore positions within universities, academies, and museums. However,

1180-552: A difficult and painful discussion within the German folklore community. Following World War II, the discussion continued about whether to align folklore studies with literature or ethnology. Within this discussion, many voices were actively trying to identify the optimal approach to take in the analysis of folklore artifacts. One major change had already been initiated by Franz Boas. Culture was no longer viewed in evolutionary terms; each culture has its own integrity and completeness, and

1298-701: A general trend of centralisation of power, so that by the Late Middle Ages there were a number of large and powerful kingdoms in Europe, which would develop into the great powers of Europe in the Early Modern period . By the end of the Middle Ages, the kings of these kingdoms would start to place arches with an orb and cross on top as an Imperial crown , which only the Holy Roman Emperor had had before. This symbolized them holding

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1416-424: A hidden castle in the forest, secretly visiting them by following a magical reel of thread given to him by a wise woman . The new Queen becomes offended at her husband's frequent absences. Curious, she bribes the servants into revealing her stepchildren 's whereabouts and her husband's reel. The Queen, who is also a witch, then sews seven magical white shirts . When the King leaves for an errand one day,

1534-437: A life cycle of linear time (ex. baptisms, weddings, funerals). This needs to be expanded to other traditions of oral lore. For folk narrative is NOT a linear chain of isolated tellings, going from one single performance on our time-space grid to the next single performance. Instead it fits better into a non-linear system, where one performer varies the story from one telling to the next, and the performer's understudy starts to tell

1652-426: A limited time, mass-produced and communicated using mass media. Individually, these tend to be labeled fads , and disappear as quickly as they appear. The term vernacular culture differs from folklore in its overriding emphasis on a specific locality or region. For example, vernacular architecture denotes the standard building form of a region, using the materials available and designed to address functional needs of

1770-469: A major reason for the country's economic and political weakness, and he promised to restore a German realm based on a cleansed, and hence strong, German people. Racial or ethnic purity" was the goal of the Nazis, intent on forging a Greater Germanic Reich . In the postwar years, departments of folklore were established in multiple German universities. However an analysis of just how folklore studies supported

1888-468: A modern academic discipline, folklore studies straddles the space between the social sciences and the humanities . The study of folklore originated in Europe in the first half of the 19th century with a focus on the oral folklore of the rural peasant populations. The " Kinder- und Hausmärchen " of the Brothers Grimm , first published 1812, is the best known collection of the verbal folklore of

2006-503: A negative feedback loop at the next iteration. Both performer and audience are acting within the "Twin Laws" of folklore transmission , in which novelty and innovation is balanced by the conservative forces of the familiar. Even further, the presence of a folklore observer at a performance of any kind will influence the performance itself in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Because folklore is firstly an act of communication between parties, it

2124-535: A new action. The field has expanded from a focus on mechanistic and biological systems to an expanded recognition that these theoretical constructs can also be applied to many cultural and societal systems, including folklore. Once divorced from a model of tradition that works solely on a linear time scale (i.e. moving from one folklore performance to the next), we begin to ask different questions about how these folklore artifacts maintain themselves over generations and centuries. The oral tradition of jokes as an example

2242-447: A social group and to collect their lore, preferably in situ. Once collected, these data need to be documented and preserved to enable further access and study. The documented lore is then available to be analyzed and interpreted by folklorists and other cultural historians, and can become the basis for studies of either individual customs or comparative studies. There are multiple venues, be they museums, journals or folk festivals to present

2360-460: A study of homoerotic subtext in American football and anal-erotic elements in German folklore, were not always appreciated and involved Dundes in several major folklore studies controversies during his career. True to each of these approaches, and any others one might want to employ (political, women's issues, material culture, urban contexts, non-verbal text, ad infinitum), whichever perspective

2478-678: A systematic and pioneering way since the late 19th century. In the work of compiling the popular traditions of the Chilean people and of the original peoples, they stood out, not only in the study of national folklore, but also in Latin America. Ramón Laval, Julio Vicuña, Rodolfo Lenz, José Toribio Medina, Tomás Guevara, Félix de Augusta, and Aukanaw, among others, generated an important documentary and critical corpus around oral literature , autochthonous languages, regional dialects, and peasant and indigenous customs. They published, mainly during

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2596-466: A trove of cultures rubbing elbows with each other, mixing and matching into exciting combinations as new generations come up. It is in the study of their folklife that we begin to understand the cultural patterns underlying the different ethnic groups. Language and customs provide a window into their view of reality. "The study of varying worldviews among ethnic and national groups in America remains one of

2714-399: A wide-variety of sometimes synonymous terms. Folklore was the original term used in this discipline. Its synonym, folklife , came into circulation in the second half of the 20th century, at a time when some researchers felt that the term folklore was too closely tied exclusively to oral lore. The new term folklife , along with its synonym folk culture , is meant to include all aspects of

2832-594: Is a social group which includes two or more persons with common traits, who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. "Folk is a flexible concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family. " This expanded social definition of folk expands the material considered to be folklore artifacts to include "things people make with words (verbal lore), things they make with their hands (material lore), and things they make with their actions (customary lore)". The folklorist studies

2950-407: Is an absolute, when he holds the whole legislative , judicial , and executive power , or when the legislative or judicial powers, or both, are vested in other people by the king. Kings are hereditary sovereigns when they hold the powers of government by right of birth or inheritance, and elective when raised to the throne by choice. The term king may also refer to a king consort , a title that

3068-573: Is attested in a Romanian tale, which was also compared to the Grimm's tale. The geese transformation is present in the Irish variant The Twelve Wild Geese , collected by Irish folklorist Patrick Kennedy and compared to the German variants ("The Twelve Brothers" and "The Seven Ravens") and the Norse one ("The Twelve Wild Ducks"). In a tale attributed to Northern European origin, The Twelve White Peacocks ,

3186-465: Is best known for his collection of epic Finnish poems published under the title Kalevala . John Fanning Watson in the United States published the "Annals of Philadelphia". With increasing industrialization, urbanization, and the rise in literacy throughout Europe in the 19th century, folklorists were concerned that the oral knowledge and beliefs, the lore of the rural folk would be lost. It

3304-592: Is born years later and seeks her brothers. The tale continues with the motif of the poisoned apple and glass coffin of Snow White (ATU 709) and concludes as tale type ATU 706, " The Maiden Without Hands ". Folklorists Johannes Bolte and Jiri Polivka , in their commentaries to the Grimm fairy tales, compiled several variants where the brothers are transformed into all sorts of beasts and terrestrial animals, such as deer, wolves, and sheep. Likewise, Georgian professor Elene Gogiashvili stated that in Georgian variants of

3422-527: Is chosen will spotlight some features and leave other characteristics in the shadows. With the passage in 1976 of the American Folklife Preservation Act, folklore studies in the United States came of age. This legislation follows in the footsteps of other legislation designed to safeguard more tangible aspects of our national heritage worthy of protection. This law also marks a shift in our national awareness; it gives voice to

3540-420: Is found across all cultures, and is documented as early as 1600 B.C. Whereas the subject matter varies widely to reflect its cultural context, the form of the joke remains remarkably consistent. According to the theories of cybernetics and its secondary field of autopoiesis , this can be attributed to a closed loop auto-correction built into the system maintenance of oral folklore. Auto-correction in oral folklore

3658-451: Is incomplete without inclusion of the reception in its analysis. The understanding of folklore performance as communication leads directly into modern linguistic theory and communication studies . Words both reflect and shape our worldview. Oral traditions, particularly in their stability over generations and even centuries, provide significant insight into the ways in which insiders of a culture see, understand, and express their responses to

The Six Swans - Misplaced Pages Continue

3776-607: Is just a partial list of the fields of study related to folklore studies, all of which are united by a common interest in subject matter. It is well-documented that the term folklore was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms . He fabricated it for use in an article published in the August 22, 1846 issue of The Athenaeum . Thoms consciously replaced the contemporary terminology of popular antiquities or popular literature with this new word. Folklore

3894-483: Is of Germanic origin, and historically refers to Germanic kingship , in the pre-Christian period a type of tribal kingship . The monarchies of Europe in the Christian Middle Ages derived their claim from Christianisation and the divine right of kings , partly influenced by the notion of sacral kingship inherited from Germanic antiquity . The Early Middle Ages begin with a fragmentation of

4012-576: Is sometimes given to the husband of a queen regnant , but the title of prince consort is more common. The English term king is derived from the Anglo-Saxon cyning , which in turn is derived from the Common Germanic * kuningaz . The Common Germanic term was borrowed into Estonian and Finnish at an early time, surviving in these languages as kuningas . It is a derivation from the term *kunjom "kin" ( Old English cynn ) by

4130-631: Is the Jewish Christmas Tree , a point of some contention among American Jews. Public sector folklore was introduced into the American Folklore Society in the early 1970s. These public folklorists work in museums and cultural agencies to identify and document the diverse folk cultures and folk artists in their region. Beyond this, they provide performance venues for the artists, with the twin objectives of entertainment and education about different ethnic groups. Given

4248-592: Is the one who is burned at the stake as punishment. In the end, the Queen, her husband, three children, and six brothers live happily ever after. Folklorist Stith Thompson points that the stories of the Aarne–Thompson–Uther ATU 451 tale-type follow a long literary history, beginning with the tale of the Dolopathos , in the 12th century. The Dolopathos , in medieval tradition, was later used as part of

4366-432: Is unable to keep on protecting her, and unable to properly defend herself, the Queen is sentenced to be burned at the stake as a witch. On the day of the Queen's execution, the six years expire. Even though the Queen has sewn all six star-flower shirts, the last one lacks a left sleeve. When the Queen is brought to the stake, she takes the shirts with her. Just as she is about to be burned, the six swans come flying through

4484-559: The -inga- suffix. The literal meaning is that of a "scion of the [noble] kin", or perhaps "son or descendant of one of noble birth" ( OED ). The English term translates, and is considered equivalent to, Latin rēx and its equivalents in the various European languages . The Germanic term is notably different from the word for "King" in other Indo-European languages ( *rēks "ruler"; Latin rēx , Sanskrit rājan and Irish rí ; however, see Gothic reiks and, e.g., modern German Reich and modern Dutch rijk ). The English word

4602-616: The Historical-Geographical method , also called the Finnish method. Using multiple variants of a tale, this investigative method attempted to work backwards in time and location to compile the original version from what they considered the incomplete fragments still in existence. This was the search for the "Urform", which by definition was more complete and more "authentic" than the newer, more scattered versions. The historic-geographic method has been succinctly described as

4720-500: The King of Saudi Arabia , the King of Bahrain and the King of Eswatini . Folklorist Folklore studies (also known as folkloristics, tradition studies or folk life studies in the UK) is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore . This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from

4838-662: The Knight of the Swan heroic tale. Fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes cites that the Brothers Grimm considered an origin in Greco-Roman times, with parallels also found in French and Nordic oral traditions. The Brothers Grimm themselves, on their annotations, saw a connection of "The Six Swans" tale with a story of seven swans published in the Feenmärchen (1801) and the swan-ride of the Knight of Swan (Lohengrin). They also saw

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4956-547: The Princess tells him everything and begs to remain at the hidden castle for fear of her stepmother. When the King leaves, the Princess runs away, finding her brothers in a robbers ' hut. The princes can only take their human forms for fifteen minutes every evening. They tell their sister that they have heard of a way to lift the curse: she must not speak for six years while sewing six star-flower shirts for her brothers. On

5074-667: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival and many other folklife festivals around the country. Folklore interest sparked in Turkey around the second half of the nineteenth century when the need to determine a national language came about. Their writings consisted of vocabulary and grammatical rule from the Arabic and Persian language. Although the Ottoman intellectuals were not affected by the communication gap, in 1839,

5192-554: The Tanzimat reform introduced a change to Ottoman literature. A new generation of writers with contact to the West, especially France, noticed the importance of literature and its role in the development of institutions. Following the models set by Westerners, the new generation of writers returned to Turkey bringing the ideologies of novels, short stories, plays and journalism with them. These new forms of literature were set to enlighten

5310-597: The acacia tree she is placed on by her brothers after fleeing home. The other variation is in the result of the brothers' transformation: in some versions they are ducks, in others ravens, and even eagles, geese, peacocks, blackbirds, storks, cranes, jackdaws or rooks. The eagle transformation is attested in the Polish tale Von der zwölf Prinzen, die in Adler verwandelt wurden (English: "The Twelve Princes who became Eagles"), translated as The Eagles . A similar transformation

5428-503: The folklore artifacts themselves. It became established as a field across both Europe and North America, coordinating with Volkskunde ( German ), folkeminner ( Norwegian ), and folkminnen ( Swedish ), among others. A 1982 UNESCO document titled "Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore" declared a global need to establish provisions protecting folklore from varying dangers identified in

5546-537: The imperium and being emperors in their own realm not subject even theoretically anymore to the Holy Roman Emperor. Philosophers Works Currently (as of 2023 ), seventeen kings are recognized as the heads of state of sovereign states (i.e. English king is used as official translation of the respective native titles held by the monarchs). Most of these are heads of state of constitutional monarchies ; kings ruling over absolute monarchies are

5664-725: The number of folk festivals held around the world, it becomes clear that the cultural multiplicity of a region is presented with pride and excitement. Public folklorists are increasingly being involved in economic and community development projects to elucidate and clarify differing world views of the social groups impacted by the projects. Once folklore artifacts have been recorded on the World Wide Web, they can be collected in large electronic databases and even moved into collections of big data . This compels folklorists to find new ways to collect and curate these data. Along with these new challenges, electronic data collections provide

5782-423: The traditional artifacts of a group and the groups within which these customs, traditions and beliefs are transmitted. Transmission of folk artifacts is necessary to their preservation over time outside of study by cultural archaeologist. Beliefs and customs are passed informally within a folk group mainly anonymously and in multiple variants. This is in contrast to high culture , characterized by recognition by

5900-650: The 20th century that Folklore Studies in Europe and America began to diverge. The Europeans continued with their emphasis on oral traditions of the pre-literate peasant, and remained connected to literary scholarship within the universities. By this definition, folklore was completely based in the European cultural sphere; any social group that did not originate in Europe was to be studied by ethnologists and cultural anthropologists . In this light, some twenty-first century scholars have interpreted European folkloristics as an instrument of internal colonialism , in parallel with

6018-461: The Danish fairy tale collected by Mathias Winther, De elleve Svaner (English: "The Eleven Swans"), first published in 1823, or Ligurian tale Les onze cygnes . Hungarian folk tale collector Elisabeth Sklarek compiled two Hungarian variants, Die sieben Wildgänse ("The Seven Wild Geese") and Die zehn Geschwister ("The Ten Siblings"), and, in her commentaries, noted that both tales were related to

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6136-499: The European peasantry. This interest in stories, sayings and songs, i.e. verbal lore , continued throughout the 19th century and aligned the fledgling discipline of folklore studies with literature and mythology . By the turn into the 20th century, European folklorists remained focused on the oral folklore of the homogeneous peasant populations in their regions, while the American folklorists, led by Franz Boas , chose to consider Native American cultures in their research, and included

6254-456: The Grimm versions. A third Hungarian is titled A tizenkét fekete várju ("The Twelve Black Ravens"). Ludwig Bechstein collected two German variants, The Seven Crows and The Seven Swans . Commenting on the Irish variant collected by Patrick Kennedy , Louis Brueyre indicated as another variant the Indian tale of Truth's Triumph , or Der Sieg der Wahrheit : in the second part of the tale,

6372-450: The King's wicked mother does not consider her daughter-in-law fit to be a Queen. When the young Queen gives birth to her first child, her mother-in-law kidnaps the baby and accuses the Queen of killing and eating him, but the King refuses to believe it. During the next two years, the Queen has two more babies but twice more , her mother-in-law kidnaps them and falsely claims that the Queen has killed and eaten her own children. The King

6490-640: The Middle East, as well as in India and in the Americas. In Europe only, there exist "over two hundred versions" collected and published "in folktale collections from all parts" of the continent. French scholar Nicole Belmont identified two forms of the tale type in Europe: one "essentially" present in the Germanic area and Scandinavia, and another she dubbed "western version". She noted that in this western version,

6608-476: The Nazi Party. Their expressed goal was to re-establish what they perceived as the former purity of the Germanic peoples of Europe. The German anti-Nazi philosopher Ernst Bloch was one of the main analysts and critics of this ideology. "Nazi ideology presented racial purity as the means to heal the wounds of the suffering German state following World War I. Hitler painted the ethnic heterogeneity of Germany as

6726-402: The Queen follows the reel to the hidden castle. Mistaking her for their father, the six princes rush out to greet their stepmother who then throws the shirts over her stepsons, transforming them into swans . Believing that she has cursed all seven of her stepchildren, the Queen goes home. But the princes' sister remains human and has witnessed the enchantment. When her father does visit,

6844-538: The advent of the digital age , the question once again foregrounds itself concerning the relevance of folklore in this new century. Although the profession in folklore grows and the articles and books on folklore topics proliferate, the traditional role of the folklorist is indeed changing. The United States is known as a land of immigrants; with the exception of the first Indian nations , everyone originally came from somewhere else. Americans are proud of their cultural diversity . For folklorists, this country represents

6962-458: The air. The Queen throws the shirts over her brothers and they regain their human form, but the youngest retains a left wing instead of an arm (in some variants, the sister is unable to finish the last shirt in time, leaving her youngest brother a swan permanently). The Queen is now free to speak and, with her brothers' support, proves she is innocent of the crimes against her. The Queen's three missing children are found alive and her mother-in-law

7080-455: The amateur at the turn of the 20th century was to collect and classify cultural artifacts from the pre-industrial rural areas, parallel to the drive in the life sciences to do the same for the natural world. "Folk was a clear label to set materials apart from modern life…material specimens, which were meant to be classified in the natural history of civilization. Tales, originally dynamic and fluid, were given stability and concreteness by means of

7198-601: The auspices of the Federal Writers Project during these years continues to offer a goldmine of primary source materials for folklorists and other cultural historians. As chairman of the Federal Writers' Project between 1938 and 1942, Benjamin A. Botkin supervised the work of these folklore field workers. Both Botkin and John Lomax were particularly influential during this time in expanding folklore collection techniques to include more detailing of

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7316-740: The beliefs and customs of diverse cultural groups in their region. These positions are often affiliated with museums, libraries, arts organizations, public schools, historical societies, etc. The most renowned of these is the American Folklife Center at the Smithsonian, which hosts the Smithsonian Folklife Festival every summer in Washington, DC. Public folklore differentiates itself from the academic folklore supported by universities, in which collection, research and analysis are primary goals. The field of folklore studies uses

7434-408: The boys' poor mother curses her twelve sons into the avian form, while also giving an escape clause: after their sister is born, she should sew twelve shirts to save them. In a Sudanese tale, The ten white doves , the titular white doves are ten brothers transformed by their stepmother. Their sister has a dream where an old woman tells her the key to reversing the curse: weaving coats with leaves from

7552-505: The constant rhythms of the natural world. Within the last decades our time scale has expanded from unimaginably small ( nanoseconds ) to unimaginably large ( deep time ). In comparison, our working concept of time as {past : present : future} looks almost quaint. How do we map "tradition" into this multiplicity of time scales? Folklore studies has already acknowledged this in the study of traditions which are either done in an annual cycle of circular time (ex. Christmas, May Day), or in

7670-491: The customs and beliefs of the group. Or it can be performance for an outside group, in which the first goal is to set the performers apart from the audience. This analysis then goes beyond the artifact itself, be it dance, music or story-telling. It goes beyond the performers and their message. As part of performance studies, the audience becomes part of the performance. If any folklore performance strays too far from audience expectations, it will likely be brought back by means of

7788-667: The digital age, the binary thinking of the 20th century structuralists remains an important tool in the folklorist's toolbox. This does not mean that binary thinking was invented in recent times along with computers; only that we became aware of both the power and the limitations of the "either/or" construction. In folklore studies, the multiple binaries underlying much of the theoretical thinking have been identified – {dynamicism : conservatism}, {anecdote : myth}, {process : structure}, {performance : tradition}, {improvisation : repetition}, {variation : traditionalism}, {repetition : innovation}; not to overlook

7906-414: The discipline is that this term places undue emphasis on the origination of the artifact as a sign of authenticity of the tradition. Adjacently, the adjective folkloric is used to designate materials having the character of folklore or tradition, at the same time making no claim to authenticity. There are several goals of active folklore research. The first objective is to identify tradition bearers within

8024-696: The document. UNESCO further published the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003. The American Folklife Preservation Act (P.L. 94-201) passed in 1976 by the United States Congress in conjunction with the Bicentennial Celebration included a definition of folklore, also called folklife : "...[Folklife] means the traditional expressive culture shared within

8142-431: The elites of a given society and identified as specific works created by individuals. The folklorist study the significance of these beliefs, customs and objects for the group. In folklore studies "folklore means something – to the tale teller, to the song singer, to the fiddler, and to the audience or addressees". The field assumes cultural units would not be passed along unless they had some continued relevance within

8260-428: The emerging middle class. For literate, urban intellectuals and students of folklore the folk was someone else and the past was recognized as being something truly different. Folklore became a measure of the progress of society , how far we had moved forward into the industrial present and indeed removed ourselves from a past marked by poverty, illiteracy and superstition. The task of both the professional folklorist and

8378-415: The event of doing something within a given context, for a specific audience, using artifacts as necessary props in the communication of traditions between individuals and within groups. Beginning in the 1970s, these new areas of folklore studies became articulated in performance studies , where traditional behaviors are evaluated and understood within the context of their performance. It is the meaning within

8496-469: The field of folklore studies even as it continues to be a point of discussion within the field. Public folklore is a relatively new offshoot of folklore studies, starting after the Second World War and modeled on the work of Alan Lomax and Ben Botkin in the 1930s. Lomax and Botkin emphasized applied folklore , with modern public sector folklorists working to document, preserve and present

8614-532: The first decades of the 20th century, linguistic and philological studies, dictionaries, comparative studies between the national folklores of Ibero-America, compilations of stories, poetry, and religious traditions. In 1909, at the initiative of Laval, Vicuña and Lenz, the Chilean Folklore Society was founded, the first of its kind in America. Two years later, it would merge with the recently created Chilean Society of History and Geography. With

8732-498: The fore following World War II; as spokesman, William Bascom formulated the 4 functions of folklore . This approach takes a more top-down approach to understand how a specific form fits into and expresses meaning within the culture as a whole. A third method of folklore analysis, popular in the late 20th century, is the Psychoanalytic Interpretation, championed by Alan Dundes . His monographs, including

8850-656: The former Western Roman Empire into barbarian kingdoms . In Western Europe, the kingdom of the Franks developed into the Carolingian Empire by the 8th century, and the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England were unified into the kingdom of England by the 10th century. With the breakup of the Carolingian Empire in the 9th century, the system of feudalism places kings at the head of a pyramid of relationships between liege lords and vassals, dependent on

8968-461: The group, though their meaning can shift and morph with time. Folklore is a naturally occurring and necessary component of any social group. Folklore does not need to be old; it continues through the modern day. It is created, transmitted, and used to establish "us" and "them" within a given group. The unique nature of a culture's folklore requires the development of methods of study by the culture at hand for effective identification and research. As

9086-457: The imperialistic dimensions of early 20th century cultural anthropology and Orientalism . Unlike contemporary anthropology, however, many early European folklorists were themselves members of the prioritized groups that folkloristics was intended to study; for instance, Andrew Lang and James George Frazer were both themselves Scotsmen and studied rural folktales from towns near where they grew up. In contrast to this, American folklorists, under

9204-525: The influence of the German-American Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict , sought to incorporate other cultural groups living in their region into the study of folklore. This included not only customs brought over by northern European immigrants, but also African Americans, Acadians of eastern Canada, Cajuns of Louisiana, Hispanics of the American southwest, and Native Americans . Not only were these distinct cultural groups all living in

9322-534: The interview context. This was a significant move away from viewing the collected artifacts as isolated fragments, broken remnants of an incomplete pre-historic whole. Using these new interviewing techniques, the collected lore became embedded in and imbued with meaning within the framework of its contemporary practice. The emphasis moved from the lore to the folk, i.e. the groups and the people who gave this lore meaning within contemporary daily living. In Europe during these same decades, folklore studies were drifting in

9440-417: The local economy. Folk architecture is a subset of this, in which the construction is not done by a professional architect or builder, but by an individual putting up a needed structure in the local style. Therefore, all folklore is vernacular culture, but not all vernacular culture necessarily folklore. In addition to these terms, folklorism refers to "material or stylistic elements of folklore [presented] in

9558-522: The masses. He later produced a collection of four thousand proverbs. Many other poets and writers throughout the Turkish nation began to join in on the movement including Ahmet Midhat Efendi who composed short stories based on the proverbs written by Sinasi. These short stories, like many folk stories today, were intended to teach moral lessons to its readers. The study of folklore in Chile was developed in

9676-499: The most extensive literary use of American folklore of its time. By the beginning of the 20th century these collections had grown to include artifacts from around the world and across several centuries. A system to organize and categorize them became necessary. Antti Aarne published a first classification system for folktales in 1910. It was later expanded into the Aarne–Thompson classification system by Stith Thompson and remains

9794-492: The most important unfinished tasks for folklorists and anthropologists." Contrary to a widespread concern, we are not seeing a loss of diversity and increasing cultural homogenization across the land. In fact, critics of this theory point out that as different cultures mix, the cultural landscape becomes multifaceted with the intermingling of customs. People become aware of other cultures and pick and choose different items to adopt from each other. One noteworthy example of this

9912-417: The national understanding that diversity within the country is a unifying feature, not something that separates us. "We no longer view cultural difference as a problem to be solved, but as a tremendous opportunity. In the diversity of American folklife we find a marketplace teeming with the exchange of traditional forms and cultural ideas, a rich resource for Americans". This diversity is celebrated annually at

10030-482: The need to collect these vestiges of rural traditions became more compelling, the need to formalize this new field of cultural studies became apparent. The British Folklore Society was established in 1878 and the American Folklore Society was established a decade later. These were just two of a plethora of academic societies founded in the latter half of the 19th century by educated members of

10148-538: The opportunity to ask different questions, and combine with other academic fields to explore new aspects of traditional culture. Computational humor is just one new field that has taken up the traditional oral forms of jokes and anecdotes for study, holding its first dedicated conference in 1996. This takes us beyond gathering and categorizing large joke collections. Scholars are using computers firstly to recognize jokes in context, and further to attempt to create jokes using artificial intelligence . As we move forward in

10266-466: The original binary of the first folklorists: {traditional : modern} or {old : new}. Bauman re-iterates this thought pattern in claiming that at the core of all folklore is the dynamic tension between tradition and variation (or creativity). Noyes uses similar vocabulary to define [folk] group as "the ongoing play and tension between, on the one hand, the fluid networks of relationship we constantly both produce and negotiate in everyday life and, on

10384-426: The other hand, if she speaks before the end of the sixth year, the spell will never be broken. The Princess agrees to do this and, sheltering in a tree , dedicates herself solely to gathering the star-flowers and sewing the shirts in silence. In the fourth year, the young King of another country finds the Princess sewing. Taken by her beauty, the King takes the Princess to his kingdom and makes her his wife . However,

10502-569: The other, the imagined communities we also create and enact but that serve as forces of stabilizing allegiance." This thinking only becomes problematic in light of the theoretical work done on binary opposition , which exposes the values intrinsic to any binary pair. Typically, one of the two opposites assumes a role of dominance over the other. The categorization of binary oppositions is "often value-laden and ethnocentric", imbuing them with illusory order and superficial meaning. Another baseline of western thought has also been thrown into disarray in

10620-493: The people of Turkey, influencing political and social change within the country. However, the lack of understanding for the language of their writings limited their success in enacting change. Using the language of the "common people" to create literature, influenced the Tanzimat writers to gain interest in folklore and folk literature. In 1859, writer Sinasi , wrote a play in simple enough language that it could be understood by

10738-712: The policies of the Third Reich did not begin until 20 years after World War II in West Germany. Particularly in the works of Hermann Bausinger and Wolfgang Emmerich in the 1960s, it was pointed out that the vocabulary current in Volkskunde was ideally suited for the kind of ideology that the National Socialists had built up. It was then another 20 years before convening the 1986 Munich conference on folklore and National Socialism. This continues to be

10856-484: The printed page." Viewed as fragments from a pre-literate culture, these stories and objects were collected without context to be displayed and studied in museums and anthologies, just as bones and potsherds were gathered for the life sciences. Kaarle Krohn and Antti Aarne were active collectors of folk poetry in Finland. The Scotsman Andrew Lang is known for his 25 volumes of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books from around

10974-544: The recent past. In western culture, we live in a time of progress , moving forward from one moment to the next. The goal is to become better and better, culminating in perfection. In this model time is linear, with direct causality in the progression. "You reap what you sow", "A stitch in time saves nine", "Alpha and omega", the Christian concept of an afterlife all exemplify a cultural understanding of time as linear and progressive. In folklore studies, going backwards in time

11092-682: The regional rule of barons , and the intermediate positions of counts (or earls ) and dukes . The core of European feudal manorialism in the High Middle Ages were the territories of the former Carolingian Empire , i.e. the kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire (centered on the nominal kingdoms of Germany and Italy ). In the course of the European Middle Ages, the European kingdoms underwent

11210-406: The research results. The final step in this methodology involves advocating for these groups in their distinctiveness. The specific tools needed by folklorists to do their research are manifold. The folklorist also rubs shoulders with researchers, tools and inquiries of neighboring fields: literature, anthropology, cultural history, linguistics, geography, musicology, sociology, psychology. This

11328-484: The same regions, but their proximity to each other caused their traditions and customs to intermingle. The lore of these distinct social groups, all of them Americans, was considered the bailiwick of American folklorists, and aligned American folklore studies more with ethnology than with literary studies. Then came the 1930s and the worldwide Great Depression . In the United States the Federal Writers' Project

11446-442: The social group that becomes the focus for these folklorists, foremost among them Richard Baumann and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett . Enclosing any performance is a framework which signals that the following is something outside of ordinary communication. For example, "So, have you heard the one…" automatically flags the following as a joke. A performance can take place either within a cultural group, re-iterating and re-enforcing

11564-419: The standard classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. As the number of classified artifacts grew, similarities were noted in items which had been collected from very different geographic regions, ethnic groups and epochs. In an effort to understand and explain the similarities found in tales from different locations, the Finnish folklorists Julius and Kaarle Krohne developed

11682-407: The story, also varying each performance in response to multiple factors. Cybernetics was first developed in the 20th century; it investigates the functions and processes of systems. The goal in cybernetics is to identify and understand a system's closed signaling loop, in which an action by the system generates a change in the environment, which in turn triggers feedback to the system and initiates

11800-431: The study of German Volkskunde had yet to be defined as an academic discipline. In the 1920s this originally apolitical movement was coopted by nationalism in several European countries, including Germany, where it was absorbed into emerging Nazi ideology. The vocabulary of German Volkskunde such as Volk (folk), Rasse (race), Stamm (tribe), and Erbe (heritage) were frequently referenced by

11918-538: The tale is The Seven Doves ( Neapolitan : Li sette palommelle ; Italian : I sette colombi ), in Giambattista Basile 's Pentamerone , where the brothers are transformed into doves. In the tale from the Brothers Grimm, there are six brothers and they are transformed into swans. In other European variants, the number of princes/brothers alternates between three, seven or twelve , but very rarely there are two, eight, nine, ten or even eleven, such as

12036-474: The tale type the brothers (usually nine) change into deer, while in Armenian variants, they number seven and become rams. King King is the title given to a male monarch in a variety of contexts. A king is an absolute monarch if he holds the powers of government without control, or the entire sovereignty over a nation ; he is a limited monarch if his power is restrained by fixed laws; and he

12154-408: The totality of their customs and beliefs as folklore. This distinction aligned American folklore studies with cultural anthropology and ethnology . American folklorists thus used the same data collection techniques as these fields in their own field research . This the diverse alliance of folklore studies with other academic fields offers a variety of theoretical vantage points and research tools to

12272-411: The twelve princelings are transformed into peacocks due to a curse cast by a troll. The blackbird transformation is attested in a Central European tale ( The Blackbird ), collected by Theodor Vernaleken: the twelve brothers kill a blackbird and bury it in the garden, and from its grave springs an apple-tree bearing the fruit the causes the transformation. The avian transformation of storks is present in

12390-591: The various groups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional; expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft; these expressions are mainly learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, and are generally maintained without benefit of formal instruction or institutional direction." This law in conjunction with other legislation

12508-487: The world around them. Three major approaches to folklore interpretation were developed during the second half of the 20th century. Structuralism in folklore studies attempts to define the structures underlying oral and customary folklore. Once classified, it was easy for structural folklorists to lose sight of the overarching issue: what are the characteristics which keep a form constant and relevant over multiple generations? Functionalism in folklore studies also came to

12626-546: The world. Francis James Child was an American academic who collected English and Scottish popular ballads and their American variants, published as the Child Ballads . In the United States, Mark Twain was a charter member of the American Folklore Society. Both he and Washington Irving drew on folklore to write their stories. The 1825 novel Brother Jonathan by John Neal is recognized as

12744-582: The year are stressed as important." In a more specific example, the folklorist Barre Toelken describes the Navajo as living in circular times, which is echoed and re-enforced in their sense of space, the traditional circular or multi-sided hogan . Lacking the European mechanistic devices of marking time (clocks, watches, calendars), they depended on the cycles of nature: sunrise to sunset, winter to summer. Their stories and histories are not marked by decades and centuries, but remain close in, as they circle around

12862-423: The youngest child, a girl, witnesses the transformation of her one hundred brothers into crows. In a Lithuanian variant, Von den zwölf Brüdern, die als Raben verwandelt wurden or The Twelve Brothers, Twelve Black Ravens , the witch stepmother asks for her husband to kill his sons, burn their bodies and deliver her the ashes. In the Hungarian variant A tizenkét koronás hattyu és a csiháninget fonó testvérkéjük ,

12980-625: The youngest sister, after she settles with the brothers, asks for fire from a neighbouring ogre, and a tree sprouts on their yard and bears fruit that causes the transformation. Variants have also been collected in Japan with the name 七羽の白鳥 (Romanization: Nanaha no hakuchō ; English: "The Seven Swans"). However, Japanese scholarship acknowledges that these tales are restricted to Kikaijima and Okinoerabujima . Japanese folklorist Keigo Seki also found variants in Kagoshima . A literary predecessor to

13098-639: Was also a valid avenue of exploration. The goal of the early folklorists of the historic-geographic school was to reconstruct from fragments of folk tales the Urtext of the original mythic (pre-Christian) world view. When and where was an artifact documented? Those were the important questions posed by early folklorists in their collections. Armed with these data points, a grid pattern of time-space coordinates for artifacts could be plotted. Awareness has grown that different cultures have different concepts of time (and space). In his study "The American Indian Mind in

13216-437: Was designed to protect the natural and cultural heritage of the United States in alignment with efforts to promote and protect the cultural diversity of the United States and recognize it as a national strength and a resource worthy of protection. The term folklore contains component parts folk and lore . The word folk originally applied to rural, frequently poor and illiterate peasants. A contemporary definition of folk

13334-558: Was established as part of the WPA . Its goal was to offer paid employment to thousands of unemployed writers by engaging them in various cultural projects around the country. These white collar workers were sent out as field workers to collect the oral folklore of their regions, including stories, songs, idioms and dialects. The most famous of these collections is the Slave Narrative Collection . The folklore collected under

13452-475: Was first articulated by the folklorist Walter Anderson in his monograph on the King and the Abbot published 1923. To explain the stability of the narrative, Anderson posited a “double redundancy”, in which the performer has heard the story from multiple other performers, and has himself performed it multiple times. This provides a feedback loop between repetitions at both levels to retain the essential elements of

13570-550: Was not progressing either toward wholeness or toward fragmentation. Individual artifacts must have meaning within the culture and for individuals themselves in order to assume cultural relevance and assure continued transmission. Because the European folklore movement had been primarily oriented toward oral traditions, a new term, folklife , was introduced to represent the full range of traditional culture. This included music , dance , storytelling , crafts , costume , foodways and more. In this period, folklore came to refer to

13688-478: Was posited that the stories, beliefs and customs were surviving fragments of a cultural mythology of the region, pre-dating Christianity and rooted in pagan peoples and beliefs. This thinking goes in lockstep with the rise of nationalism across Europe. Some British folklorists, rather than lamenting or attempting to preserve rural or pre-industrial cultures, saw their work as a means of furthering industrialization, scientific rationalism, and disenchantment . As

13806-526: Was promptly fulfilled; and in the "West Prussian" tale Die sieben Dohlen ("The Seven Jackdaws"), collected by professor Alfred Cammann ( de ). The transformation into rooks (a type of bird) is attested in Ukrainian tale "Про сімох братів гайворонів і їх сестру" ("The Seven Rook Brothers and Their Sister"): the mother curses their sons into rooks (also called "грак" and "грайворон" in Ukrainian). A sister

13924-950: Was to emphasize the study of a specific subset of the population: the rural, mostly illiterate peasantry. In his published call for help in documenting antiquities, Thoms was echoing scholars from across the European continent to collect artifacts of older, mostly oral cultural traditions still flourishing among the rural populace. In Germany the Brothers Grimm had first published their " Kinder- und Hausmärchen " in 1812. They continued throughout their lives to collect German folk tales to include in their collection. In Scandinavia , intellectuals were also searching for their authentic Teutonic roots and had labeled their studies Folkeminde (Danish) or Folkermimne (Norwegian). Throughout Europe and America, other early collectors of folklore were at work. Thomas Crofton Croker published fairy tales from southern Ireland and, together with his wife, documented keening and other Irish funeral customs. Elias Lönnrot

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