Folklore

• 1. Introduction

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  Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people, culture, or subculture. The word itself is a compound of folk and lore, and an Englishman named William Thoms coined it in 1846. He was searching for a replacement for the clumsy terms then in use, popular antiquities and popular literature. Thoms believed the old oral traditions of the rural poor would die out as people learned to read. He issued a published call for help in documenting them before they vanished. He was wrong about their disappearance, but he gave a name to something all around us. What counts as folk has shifted across two centuries. What counts as lore has expanded far beyond fireside tales. And a discipline grew up to study it, one that still argues with itself about what it is. These are the questions this documentary follows.

• 2. Who Counts As Folk

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  Rural, illiterate, and poor: that was the folk of the 19th century, the social group named in Thoms's original term. They were peasants of the countryside, set against the urban populace of the cities. Only late in that century did the urban proletariat, riding on Marxist theory, join the rural poor under the label. The common thread was their position as the underclass of society.

  By the 1960s, folklorists had thrown that boundary out entirely. They came to understand that folk groups are everywhere, and each person belongs to many at once. The first group anyone is born into is the family, and every family carries its own unique family folklore. As a child grows, identities multiply to include age, language, ethnicity, and occupation. One folklorist insisted this was not idle speculation. Decades of fieldwork proved conclusively that such groups have their own folklore.

  Researchers then began surfacing folk groups long overlooked. An issue of the Journal of American Folklore published in 1975 was given over entirely to women's folklore, examined from perspectives that had not come from a man's point of view. Non-traditional families and occupational groups were studied too. Richard Dorson put the purpose plainly in 1976. The field studies traditional or unofficial culture, he wrote, not to prove a thesis but to learn about the mass of humanity overlooked by the conventional disciplines. As one folklorist noted, new groups keep generating new folklore: surfers, motorcyclists, computer programmers.

• 3. Verbal, Material, Customary

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  Three types organize the artifacts: material, verbal, and customary lore. Verbal lore covers spoken, sung, and voiced forms that show repetitive patterns recognized by speaker and audience alike. The phrase An elephant walks into a bar instantly flags what follows as a joke. The child's song Old MacDonald Had a Farm shifts its animals, their order, and their sounds with every performance. Antti Aarne published the first classification system for folktales in 1910, later expanded by Stith Thompson into the Aarne-Thompson system that remains standard for European folktales.

  Material culture takes in everything that can be touched, held, lived in, or eaten. Some folklorists of the 19th century raced to record hand-crafted objects before industrial manufacturing erased their production. Folk art lives in hex signs on Pennsylvania Dutch barns, tin man sculptures, carved gun stocks, and tattoos. The living museum emerged in Scandinavia at the end of the 19th century, an open-air space where actors reenact pre-industrial life using the material artifacts themselves.

  Customary culture is remembered enactment, the expected way of doing things. It runs from a single gesture like thumbs down to a full birthday party scripting song, cake, games, and a wish blown over candles. Folklorists sort customs into seasonal celebrations like Thanksgiving, life cycle events like weddings, community festivals like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and customs tied to folk beliefs, such as the bad luck of walking under a ladder. William Bascom named four functions for all of it: escape from repression, validation of culture, a teaching device, and a means of social control.

• 4. The Secret World Of Children

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  Childlore passes from children to other children, away from the influence or supervision of an adult. It draws on every standard genre, verbal, material, and customary, but the child-to-child conduit is what sets it apart. Iona and Peter Opie demonstrated how to collect it in their book Children's Games in Street and Playground, studying children on their own terms rather than as a derivative of adult groups. This culture is largely unnoticed by the sophisticated world of adults and barely affected by it.

  Old MacDonald's farm shows the process at work, transformed by children from animal noises into a scatological version about animal poop. The lore circulates exclusively within an informal, pre-literate children's network. It does not include what adults teach directly, though children can take a taught thing and pass it onward into childlore. This, folklorists note, is as close as they can come to watching transmission as it worked before literacy spread in the 19th century.

  Alice Gomme in Britain and William Wells Newell in the United States feared the culture of childhood would die out and rushed to capture it. The fear proved unfounded. Set a modern school playground at recess beside the painting Children's Games by Pieter Breugel the Elder, dated 1560, and the activity level looks similar. Many games in that painting are still recognizable today. The artifacts serve development too. Bouncing rhymes build balance, tongue-twisters like Peter Piper sharpen oral and aural acuity, and the Alphabet song uses chant to memorize a series. The neuroscience behind these functions is only now being uncovered, though the games have been in play for centuries.

• 5. Romantic Roots, Atlantic Split

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  Folklore became an autonomous discipline during the period of romantic nationalism in Europe. Johann Gottfried von Herder, writing in the 1770s, presented oral traditions as organic processes grounded in the locale. After Napoleonic France invaded the German states, Herder's countrymen systematized recorded folk traditions and used them to build a nation. Smaller nations like Finland, Estonia, and Hungary embraced the approach while seeking independence from dominant neighbors.

  The Kinder- und Hausmarchen of the Brothers Grimm, first published in 1812, is the best known collection of European peasant verbal lore, though far from the only one. European folklorists kept their focus on the oral traditions of homogenous peasant populations. By the turn of the 20th century, the field had grown in number and sophistication on both continents. In North America, Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict turned to Native American cultures and folded their entire body of customs and beliefs into folklore. This pulled American folkloristics toward cultural anthropology, while the European wing stayed close to the humanities. The split gives the field a wealth of vantage points and remains a point of discussion within it.

  The terms folkloristics and folklore studies spread in the 1950s to separate the academic study from the artifacts themselves. When the U.S. Congress passed the American Folklife Preservation Act, Public Law 94-201, in January 1976 to coincide with the Bicentennial, the field came of age in the United States. The law defined folklife as traditional expressive culture shared within familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, and regional groups, learned orally and without formal instruction. It marked a shift in national awareness, treating cultural diversity as a strength worth protecting. That diversity is celebrated each year at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall in Washington, DC.

• 6. Folklore As A Verb

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  Roger D. Abrahams put it sharply: folklore is folklore only when performed. Items of folklore carry a sense of control, he said, a power that can be capitalized upon and enhanced through effective performance. Without transmission, these are just individual quirky tales and objects, not folklore at all.

  Before the Second World War, folk artifacts were collected as cultural shards of an earlier time, vestigial things bound in books and archived with no supporting data. The Historic-Geographic Method tracked them across space and time. After the war, folklorists reached for a more holistic approach. Alan Dundes published his essay Texture, Text and Context in 1964. Dan Ben-Amos brought the behavioral approach into open debate at the American Folklore Society in 1967. In 1972 Richard Dorson called the movement's young figures the young Turks. Folklore became a verb, something people do rather than something they have.

  Transmission requires a binary: a tradition-bearer who actively passes along an artifact, and an audience that listens, watches, and remembers. The tradition-bearer is a named individual known in the community, not the anonymous folk. Most of the audience become passive tradition-bearers, holding the memory without performing it. To begin, the performer brackets the act with a frame outside normal discourse. A joke opens with Have you heard the one, a fairy tale runs between Once upon a time and They all lived happily ever after. Barre Toelken once spent an evening with a Navaho family playing string figure games, each member shifting between performer and audience. Victor Turner named four universal traits of cultural performance: playfulness, framing, symbolic language, and the subjunctive mood.

• 7. How Tradition Holds Its Shape

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  Walter Anderson articulated the theory of self-correction in the 1920s, a feedback mechanism that keeps folklore variants close to the original form. He credited the audience with censoring narrators who strayed too far from the known text. Social reward by an audience, he held, is a major factor in motivating narrators. The performer, wanting to avoid negative reaction, adjusts to fit expectations. Redundancy reinforces this. A teller has heard the tale in many versions and tells it many times to audiences who expect the version they know.

  Barre Toelken named the opposing pressure a tension between dynamic and conservative elements that evolve through sharing, communication, and performance. As cultural context shifts with new leaders, technologies, and values, the artifact must shift too, or it loses its meaning. Joke cycles come and go to reflect new concerns. Once an artifact no longer fits its context, transmission stalls and it becomes an historic relic rather than living folklore.

  Material lore reveals its own context through Dundes's terms, text and context. Michael Owen Jones studied southeastern Kentucky chair makers, placing each chair within the life of its craftsman. Henry Glassie, in Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, found a repeated pattern in which the house is planted in the landscape just as the landscape completes itself with the house. The consumer, through close personal contact and the expectation of returning, drives the continuity and discontinuity of behavior. None of these artisans is anonymous folk.

• 8. Folklore Online

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  The internet is modifying the folkloric process, not killing it. Despite the long association between folklore and anti-modernity, people keep using traditional expressive forms in new media. Jokes and joking are as plentiful as ever, face-to-face and electronically. New modes reshape old stories too. The fairy tale Snow White now appears across media for children and adults, including a television show and a video game.

  Yeh and colleagues argued in 2023 that user-generated content should count as folklore, especially in mental health communities. First-hand stories of treatment experiences, often shared on YouTube, convey informal, unofficial knowledge much as traditional folklore does. These reviews reveal where mental health consumers get their information about antidepressants, the gaps in that knowledge, and the obstacles to seeking or continuing treatment. They function as dynamic, recurring expressions, a modern method of passing on informal knowledge. The same forces Thoms once feared would erase folklore are now carrying it into the next medium.