Folklore Rules

by Lynne S. McNeill

  things we do (like calendar customs, rituals, games, and rites of passage)

  things we make (like handmade objects, collections and assemblages, and folk art)

  things we believe (like superstitions, supernatural creatures, and folk religion)1

  It’s probably already obvious that there’s a good deal of overlap here, especially when it comes to the things we believe. For example, a legend is something we say about something we believe; a friendship bracelet is something we make that reflects something we believe, and a rite of passage is something we do to indicate something we believe. But as with all the not-so-clear-cut divisions we’ve made so far, this one is a useful tool for conceptualizing the breakdown of folklore, even if it’s an oversimplification.

  This chapter is going to walk through these four main categories of folklore, describing the main identifying characteristics of each and offering some initial examples of analysis.2 Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how tired of reading you are at this point), there’s not enough space in this short handbook to address all (or even most) of the subtypes included in each general category of folklore. Instead, each section below will focus on one or two major genres of folklore within that category, as an illustration of the possibilities.

  Things We Say

  The category of things we say encompasses all the folklore that comes out of our mouths or through our fingertips and onto a piece of paper or a screen. That means jokes, slang, proverbs, riddles, mnemonic devices, rhymes, songs, oaths, toasts, greetings, leave-takings—basically tons and tons of forms of folklore—but the most famous, the most well-known, and the most studied forms of verbal folklore are stories.3

  It’s probably not something you’ve ever thought about consciously, but there is a big difference between beginning a story with “Once upon a time …” and beginning a story with “You’ll never believe what happened to my aunt’s hairdresser’s cousin’s roommate last week!” The main difference is in how we expect our listeners to react to the story we’re about to tell, and this is an excellent illustration of how important the distinction between genres is in the realm of folk narrative. When it comes to things we say, folklorists have mainly studied the longer forms of folklore: the legend, the folktale, and the myth.4

  You probably can already guess that it’s a folktale that begins with “Once upon a time,” and a legend5 that begins with the friend-of-a-friend connection.6 So, what’s the difference? Well, for one, no one tells a folktale as though it actually happened. “Once upon a time, in a land far, far away” clearly sets a story in an imaginary place. Thus, when we hear that something amazing or miraculous happens in the story, we don’t really have cause to doubt it—it’s fiction!

  For example, when someone says to you, “Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was a cat named Puss who wore a lovely pair of boots and went around making farmers into kings,”7 you’re not expected to react by saying, “Wait. Hold on a sec. Are you honestly telling me that this cat could talk, much less wear human footwear?” By framing this story as a folktale, or as a fictional story, the teller makes it clear that we’re supposed to just accept what is happening without question.

  On the other hand, if a friend turns to you and says, “You’ll never believe what I just heard! My mom’s coworker’s stepson just got this new pet cat and when he got it home it started trying on his shoes and offering to help him get a promotion at work!” we absolutely would be expected to respond with disbelief.

  This illustrates one of the great distinctions between these two types of folk narrative: folktales are told as fiction and set in a fictional world, while legends are told as true8 and are set in the real world. A story told as fiction is entertainment, perhaps escapism for most people; a story told as true is more of a commentary on contemporary life. This gets at the function of these different types of folklore: legends tend to highlight the stuff that we as a society are stressed out about; folktales tend to help us forget all that for a time.

  So, if you were a folklorist out collecting stories, it would be imperative to understand whether you were collecting a folktale or a legend, especially since the content of the story might be the same in both (something strange or unexpected, like talking cats). Let’s say you collected a story about someone dining at a fast-food restaurant and making the horrible discovery that what he thought was a piece of chicken was actually a rat. If that story were told as taking place “once upon a time,” then it wouldn’t have much of a direct societal impact—who cares if some fictional person ate something gross? We might see symbolic metaphors in such a story but, as with most fairytale content, we wouldn’t expect the story’s content to directly impact our lives.

  But if that story is told as true, as having happened to someone who knows someone you know, someone very similar to yourself, perhaps, maybe living very close to you (and eating at the same restaurants—oh, horror!), then suddenly that story is saying something more. It’s a direct warning about personal health and well-being, it’s a public condemnation of a particular business, and it’s a social commentary on the conditions of modern food production and consumption. The meaning of that particular story is very dependent on what type of folk narrative it is.

  So, we have folktales as fiction and legends as true (though not necessarily believed); what about myths? Like legends, myths are told as true, but it’s a different kind of truth: it’s a sacred truth. Far from the popular use of the word myth to mean “something not true,” folklorists use this word to refer to a sacred narrative. Sacred to whom, you might ask? Well, to whatever folk group regularly shares it. Calling a particular story a myth is making no claim on the factual reality of that story; it’s simply saying that for the people who share it, the story articulates a sacred (or at least fundamental) truth. Myths, like legends, are set in the real world, but often take place in an earlier version of it—our world as it was coming into being—so that, similar to folktales, we aren’t intended to readily question the strange or amazing things that we hear in myths. So where we might see strange or miraculous events described here, just as in a folktale or a legend, again, the meaning of the story is unique to the type of narrative. In a myth, we’re looking at deeply held, fundamental beliefs of a people.

  So, in summary, we have folktales, which are told as fiction, set in a fictional world, and which are only symbolically true, if presented or perceived as true at all. We have legends, which are told as literally true (though not necessarily believed), and set in the real world. And we have myths, which are told as a sacred truth, and which are set in a sort of prototype of our world. As you can see, knowing which genre you’re dealing with when you come across a story is enormously helpful when it comes to analyzing the meaning and function of that folk narrative.

  Imagine that you’re visiting with a friend’s family, and during a discussion of the family’s immigration to the United States, your friend’s mother interrupts to say, “You know, back when great-grandma was a little girl in Sweden, she once saw a jätte in the forest.” Further explanation reveals that a jätte is a giant, and that your informant’s family regularly tells the story of their ancestor’s sighting of one with pride. The mother’s language tells you that this is a legend—the story is pitched as historical, taking place in the past but in the knowable past, not an ambiguous past of “long, long ago,” and in a particular place, Sweden, rather than “a land far, far away.” When you ask if the story is true, however, your informants demure, saying that they don’t know for sure, that it’s always been told that way in the family, that it’s maybe possible, because things like that happened in the past, but they can’t be certain.

  Consider what you know about the context of this telling of the story—it came up right as discussion was turning to the time when the family left Sweden for America, and it brought the conversation back to the topic of Swedish culture. Your friend’s family evinces a clear pride in their heritage, and you learn through discuss
ion that the sighting of a jätte is a special thing—it’s a marker of genuinely being a Swede. You get the distinct impression that your friend’s mother wants her great-grandmother to have seen a jätte, to have this uniquely Swedish experience be a part of her family history. It’s not enough to simply tell the story abstractly, or to have heard about the jätte; the use of the legend genre ties it to the family’s reality in a way that clearly matters to the family’s perception and presentation of its own identity. The genre of the narrative clearly supports the story’s function within the folk group.

  Interestingly, we see the different types of folk narrative rise and fall in popularity over time.9 Currently, legends are the most actively circulating form of narrative folklore.10 We rarely encounter folktales or myths in oral form—they tend to come to us in print. What does this mean for these stories? Are they still folklore if they’re printed in books?

  Yes, they’re certainly still folklore, but since folklore is so largely defined by its process, they can’t really be considered living folklore—they’re more like a record of once-living folklore. Think of it this way: when an archaeologist digs up an arrowhead and puts it in a museum, is it still an arrowhead? Sure. But to be in its most genuine context of use, that arrowhead should really be at the tip of an arrow, aimed at an animal during a hunt, or in a toolmaker’s hands, being carefully shaped and honed. We can learn a lot about the arrowhead by looking at it in the museum, but we’re missing a major aspect of its true cultural existence as an object, an aspect we can only guess at or imagine from the museum display. We’re also left to wonder if this arrowhead is representative of all arrowheads. Was it made using a common technique or one unique to a particular toolmaker? We would be hesitant to consider this one arrowhead as representative of all arrowheads, or of a whole group of people who used arrowheads, without knowing the ways that it was similar to or different from other arrowheads.

  Another good analogy is the study of a dead bee pinned to a card. We can learn an enormous amount about that bee: the structure and systems of its body, its size, shape, form, color, and so on. And if we had lots of bees to look at, we could get a sense of the general range of these qualities—what’s considered “typical” of bee form and physiology. But what we don’t learn a whole lot about is flight. And how can we really say that we fully understand bees if we don’t watch them fly?

  This true for stories, too. Just as with the bees and arrowheads, we can learn a whole lot about a folktale or a myth or a legend by examining printed texts. We can scrutinize a single printed version of a story. Ideally, we’ll be able to compare many versions (assuming we have many printed versions) of a story side by side and learn the breadth of variation in form, length, content, and so on. We can study the structure of the story: the dynamic qualities that change and the conservative qualities that remain consistent. But to truly understand a folk narrative, we have to watch it fly. We have to be there when it’s told so we can observe the teller and the listeners; we have to pay attention to the reactions of the audience and the actions of the performer. Only then can we truly grasp the full picture of a folk narrative.11

  This is why many folklorists prefer to study contemporary, actively circulating folklore rather than the folklore of the past; it’s easier to get the full picture. But of course, this isn’t always possible—sometimes the folklore that one wants to study simply isn’t actively circulating anymore. Ideally, even if a piece of folklore isn’t in active use, the folklorist who documented it will have used the techniques we discussed in chapter 2—documenting not only the text but the context and texture as well, so that future researchers could approximate the experience of watching the bee in flight. Unfortunately, that concentrated focus on context and texture is somewhat new, and not many folklorists of the past took the time to document those details. That doesn’t mean that the folklore isn’t worth studying—no archaeologist would say that we might as well give up studying arrowheads just because we can’t go back in time to watch them in use—but it means that we’re limited in how far our contextual analysis can go.

  Want to Know More?

  William Bascom, “The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives,” Journal of American Folklore 78 (January–March 1965): 3–20.

  This is the quintessential article that delineates the differences between folk narrative types, and here’s where you’ll find a full elaboration of the distinguishing characteristics of folktales, legends, and myths.

  Kirin Narayan, Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  This is a collection of folktales from the Himalayan foothills, presented alongside ethnographic descriptions of the contexts within which they were collected. This is a great attempt to get away from the bee-on-a-card type of story collection; it really works at describing flight as well. Readers get to know the stories, but they get to know the teller and the collector, too, and better understand their relationship with each other and with the stories.

  Jan Harold Brunvand, Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (New York: Norton, 2001).

  Jan Brunvand has written a number of books about urban legends, and any one of them makes for a fun read. This one is a compendium of many stories included in his earlier books, each documented with historical background and information to help in the debunking (and occasional proving true!) of the legends.

  William G. Doty, Myth: A Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004).

  A lot of books out there about myths aren’t written by folklorists, and, as you now know, folklorists take a very specific view of what makes a story a myth. This book both acknowledges the folklorist’s purist view and goes beyond it, to give a comprehensive understanding of how the word is used in other fields as well.

  Things We Do

  When it comes to things we do, we’re entering an incredibly broad area of folklore studies. Customs (like holiday traditions), gestures (like a thumbs-up or flipping someone off), parties (like costume parties or tea parties), rituals (like fraternity or sorority initiations, or bar mitzvahs), celebrations (like sixteenth or twenty-first birthdays), dances (like the two-step, the “Macarena,” the electric slide, the chicken dance), games (like kick the can, tag, capture the flag, and four-square12) … these are all things we do, and since many of them exist in forms that we learn informally, from our experiences in regular, everyday life, they fall under the purview of folklore. The quality these things all share in common, of course, is that they all require some kind of action—some type of body movement or physical participation in the tradition. Thus, the modes of transmission for this kind of folklore are largely observational. Unlike a legend, which can be e-mailed as easily as told in person, it’s not so easy to e-mail someone a Thanksgiving dinner celebration. Maybe you could e-mail someone an aspect of the custom, like a photo of the turkey or a copy of the toast someone gave, but not the whole experience.

  This necessary level of engagement makes customs and events a super-fun form of folklore to study. Try asking different members of your family to describe a typical holiday celebration—you’ll be surprised how much meaning different people can place on different aspects of a holiday. In fact, it’s in traditional celebrations of holidays that we can see one of folklore’s biggest impacts on the lived experience: anyone who has married or moved in with someone who decorates a Christmas tree differently (blinking lights?! Who would do such a thing?) or who bakes the “wrong” kind of pie at Thanksgiving (pumpkin is, I’m sure we all agree, the only acceptable kind) or who never made green pancakes/beer/milk on St. Patrick’s Day (blasphemy!) has likely experienced the surprising impact that deeply ingrained customs can have on a relationship.

  It can be hard to determine clear-cut boundaries for many examples of customary folklore. When does a meal begin—with the cooking or the eating?13 Does party prep or cleanup count as a traditional part of a traditional celebration? What aspects of the custom are dictated
by tradition (foods? words? actions?), and which are nontraditional or up to individual choice (dress? contributions? arrival time?)? These questions can make the documentation and analysis of customary folklore quite tricky.

  Imagine that a classmate is describing to you a weekly tradition he participates in, where a number of people gather each week to sing folk songs together. You may assume that you’re about to hear a lot of folk songs that your classmate sings, but when you initially ask him to tell you about it, he begins by explaining the group’s history, which predates his participation in it. Then, his descriptions of the actual events don’t really seem to focus only on the singing—there are desserts made and shared, beverages contributed, inside jokes told and retold, and the crisscrossing relationships of the people in the group—many of whom know each other from different, overlapping associations—often determine the shifting topics of discussion. When you ask directly about the songs they sing, there seem to be some unspoken rules at work: your classmate perceives that some songs “belong” to certain people, while others are more general. He describes a few times when someone clearly “stole” someone else’s song and there was notable tension in the group, but when pressed, he claims that no one really owns any of the songs, but that they’re just sometimes so tied to a particular singer that it might as well be a different song altogether when sung by someone else. He suggests that you join him one week, and you find yourself wondering how successfully you’d navigate the unspoken undercurrents of appropriate interaction.

  How would you go about collecting and documenting that weekly custom from your classmate? If you were transcribing his words, at what point in his explanation would you choose to start the “text” section of your documentation? When he described the group’s history? When he detailed his initial participation? How would you account for the numerous other folkloric elements of the event—the foodways, the jokes, the folk songs—that emerge from within the overall custom? What contexts would you need to describe—the general context of the weekly gathering, or the individual contexts of each singer’s age, gender, skill, repertoire, prior relationships, and longevity in the group? If the same song sung by two different people is so different as to be perceived as a separate song, would you document it twice? Just from this one example, it should be clear that the realm of “things we do” is quite (excitingly) complicated.