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As a field of study folklore focuses on the various forms of folk culture—including folk literature, performances, material culture, and customs—particularly of subcultures within broader literate and technologically advanced societies. In popular usage the term folklore is often applied narrowly to only the oral literature of a group. The study of such customs in largely nonliterate societies is usually part of the fields of ethnology and anthropology.
Jacob Ludwig Carl and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (known collectively as the Brothers Grimm) are famous for their travels through much of Europe in order to collect folktales. Jacob Grimm, in particular, did important work in historical linguistics and Germanic philology, and he sought to reconstruct pre-Christian Germanic religion. The brothers inspired scholars across Europe to record and publish oral literature, such as fairy tales and folktales, leading to large collections and the founding of archives and museums.
In the 20th century folklore studies expanded to include urban communities and diverse groups, shifting focus from the origins of present meaning and function to considering change within tradition as noncorruptive. Emphasis shifted from the past to the present, from the search for origins to the investigation of present meaning and function. Also appearing in folklore studies in the mid-20th century was the concept of urban legend—stories about an unusual or humorous event that many people believe to be true but is not.
folklore, in modern usage, an academic discipline dedicated to the study of the various forms of folk culture. Although in popular usage the term folklore is often restricted to oral literature—especially fairy tales, legends, ballads, and other forms of folk literature—it also refers to the traditional performances, material culture, and customs of a group or groups. As a discipline folklore tends to focus on subcultures within predominately literate and technologically advanced societies. The study of the traditional material and literary cultures among wholly or mainly nonliterate societies belongs to the disciplines of ethnology and anthropology.
For more on the subject of the field of folklore studies, check out our article on folk literature.
Folklore studies began in Europe in the early 19th century. The first folklorists concentrated exclusively upon rural peasants, preferably uneducated, and a few other groups relatively untouched by modernization (e.g., the Roma). Their aim was to trace preserved archaic customs and beliefs to their remote origins in order to outline the intellectual history of humanity. In Germany, Jacob Grimm used folklore to illuminate pre-Christian Germanic religion. In Britain, Edward Tylor, Andrew Lang, and others combined data from anthropology and folklore to “reconstruct” the beliefs and rituals of ancient people. The best-known work of this type is James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890).
Large collections of material were amassed in the course of these efforts. Inspired by the Brothers Grimm, whose first collection of fairy tales appeared in 1812, scholars all over Europe began recording and publishing oral literature of many genres: fairy tales and other types of folktales, ballads and other songs, oral epics, folk plays, riddles, proverbs, etc. (see folk literature). Similar work was undertaken for music, dance, and traditional arts and crafts; many archives and museums were founded. Often the underlying impulse was nationalistic; since the folklore of a group reinforced its sense of ethnic identity, it figured prominently in many struggles for political independence and national unity.
As the scholarship of folklore developed, an important advance was the classification of material for comparative analysis. Standards of identification were devised, notably for ballads (by F.J. Child) and for the plots and component motifs of folktales and myths (by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson). Using these, Finnish scholars, led by Kaarle Krohn, developed the “historical-geographical” method of research, in which every known variant of a particular tale, ballad, riddle, or other item was classified to a place and date of collection in order to study distribution patterns and reconstruct “original” forms. This method, more statistical and less speculative than that of the anthropological folklorists, dominated the field throughout the first half of the 20th century.
After World War II new trends emerged, particularly in the United States. Interest was no longer confined to rural communities, since it was recognized that cities too contained definable groups whose characteristic arts, customs, and values marked their identity. Although some Marxist scholars continued to regard folklore as belonging solely to the working classes, in other circles the concept lost its restrictions of class and even of educational level; any group that expressed its inner cohesion by maintaining shared traditions qualified as a “folk,” whether the linking factor be occupation, language, place of residence, age, religion, or ethnic origin. Emphasis also shifted from the past to the present, from the search for origins to the investigation of present meaning and function. Change and adaptation within tradition were no longer necessarily regarded as corruptive.
In the view of “contextual” and “performance” analysis in the late 20th century, a particular story, song, drama, or custom constitutes more than a mere instance to be recorded and compared with others of the same category. Rather, each phenomenon is regarded as an event arising from the interaction between the individual and the social group, which fulfills some function and satisfies some need for both performer and audience. In this functionalist, sociological view, such an event can be understood only within its total context; the performer’s biography and personality, their role in the community, their repertoire and artistry, the role of the audience, and the occasion on which the performance occurs all contribute to its folkloric meaning.
Also appearing in folklore studies in the mid-20th century was the concept of urban legend—stories about an unusual event that many people believe to be true but is not. Urban legends about media became as common as urban legends told through media, especially through mass media, such as the many tales about ghosts unexpectedly appearing in the background of movie scenes and photographs or satanic hidden messages that can be detected in rock or pop songs when played backward.
Despite some turn-of-the-century worries that the Internet would destroy folklore, the World Wide Web became a major theater for the production and transmission of folk culture. This shift came with its own changes, both theoretical (as Trevor J. Blank put it in his 2009 edited volume Folklore and the Internet: “Who are the folk in cyberspace…?”) and practical (such as adapting to how quickly folk culture spreads and changes online). It also enabled folklorists to collect large datasets and apply new methods of analysis to them. Instead of collecting data through interviews with individuals or small groups, folklorists can now collect data via Web crawling (an automated way of indexing Web content) and scraping (an automated way of collecting data). Digital data are often compiled into databases that are used by scholars to formulate research questions or to engage in distant reading, a technique used by researchers to analyze patterns across a large corpus of texts. The turn toward big data in folklore has also enabled various statistical analyses, such as social network analysis, to be applied to the field.
