There are also several recognizable formulas in folklore. This refers to standard lines such as “Once upon a time” and “they lived happily ever after.” Folklore, as mentioned above, often includes fantastic elements such as talking animals, gods, and magic. These elements make the stories much more convincing than usual. They also help those who created them to open up their environment more effectively. The genre of material culture includes all artifacts that can be touched, held, inhabited or eaten. They are tangible objects with physical or mental presence, either intended for permanent use or intended for use at the next meal. Most of these folk artifacts are individual objects created by hand for a specific purpose. However, folk artifacts can also be mass-produced, such as dreidels or Christmas decorations. These objects continue to be considered folklore because of their long (pre-industrial) history and common use. All these material objects “existed before and in parallel with mechanized industry. [They are] transmitted from generation to generation and are subject to the same forces of conservative tradition and individual variation”[25] found in all folk artifacts. Folklorists are interested in physical form, method of production or construction, mode of use and supply of raw materials.
[28] The significance for those who make and use these objects is important. The complex balance of continuity on change in their design and decoration is of paramount importance in these studies. J.R.R. Tolkien`s Lord of the Rings trilogy is a perfect example of an author inventing folklore to enrich his fictional cultures. He wrote an entire book, The Silmarillion, which describes the folklore/mythology of the elves. Of course, the whole Lord of the Rings saga was heavily influenced by Norse, Welsh and Finnish folklore, so Tolkien had plenty of excellent source material to draw from. Alan Garner is a renowned English writer known for writing fantasy stories and tales of traditional English folk tales. His works are mainly rooted in the history, landscape and folklore of his native Cheshire. One such children`s novel is The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley, which takes a local legend from The Wizard of the Edge and describes the landscapes and folklore of the nearby town of Alderley Edge, where Alan grew up. The novel is set in Alderley Edge in Cheshire and Macclesfield.
This is a very good example of the use of folktales in literature. The culture of a community is shared by folklore. Folklore could speak of an important event that influenced the people of this community in an important way. Popular literature, also called folklore or oral tradition, the transmission (traditional knowledge and beliefs) of cultures without a written language. It is transmitted by word of mouth and, like written literature, consists of prose and verse narratives, poems and songs, myths, dramas, rituals, proverbs, riddles and the like. Almost every known people, now or in the past, have produced it. This series is an incredibly popular contemporary example of a writer creating their own world, culture, songs, dances and stories to connect them. Tolkien creates folklore within different cultures, from hobbits to elves, helping readers understand what motivates the characters and what their belief systems are based on. For example, songs/poems that Tolkien uses in his books like “The Riddle of Strider”. Sleeping Beauty is an example of such a story. In this fairy tale, a princess is cursed by an evil fairy to sleep for a hundred years.
The only way to end the curse is for a prince to wake them up. A fairy godmother also falls asleep with all the living beings in the palace so that the princess does not wake up alone from her curse. This story has the element of good and evil that is common in fairy tale folklore. It has been argued that popular history should be considered a separate subcategory of folklore, an idea that has attracted the attention of folklorists such as Richard Dorson. This area of study is presented in The Folklore Historian, an annual journal sponsored by the History and Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society that explores the links between folklore and history as well as the history of folklore research. [43] A. K. Ramanujan has written extensively on contextual sensitivity as a subject in numerous cultural essays, classical poetry, and Indian folklore. In his works Three Hundred Ramayanas, and Where Mirrors are Windows, he discusses the intertextual quality of Indian written and oral literature.
His popular essay Where Mirrors Are Windows: Towards an Anthology of Reflections and his commentaries on Indian folktales, including Oral Tales from Twenty Indian Languages and The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology, present perfect examples of studies of Indian folk literature. The concept of folk has changed over time. When Thoms first coined the term, people only referred to rural peasants, who were often poor and illiterate. A more modern definition of persons is a social group that includes two or more people with common characteristics that express their common identity through distinct traditions.