What Are Tales in the Oral Tradition? — Basics I

Tales are at the heart of Llegendàrium. But what kinds of tales? Folktales? Tales from oral tradition? What is the difference between these terms, and what do they mean? Aren’t there also written tales, like those of Perrault or Andersen? How are tales passed on? Why do some survive while others disappear? And what, for that matter, is folklore? In this article, the first in a series on basic concepts in folklore studies, I will try to answer these and many related questions.

What is folklore… in a manner of speaking

Let us begin with folklore, a term that even specialists have always found difficult to define. The earliest definitions, dating from around the middle of the nineteenth century, described folklore as a kind of spiritual essence preserved by poor, rural people. Steeped in Romantic thought and German idealism, they presented folklore as the practices of elderly people in the countryside and forests, a vanishing way of life thought to be more deeply rooted in a people’s past. This sentimental, idealised and, later, nationalist view is still widely held today.

When people imagine escaping an urban life that has broken communities into lonely individuals and crushed them under alienating work and relentless psychological propaganda, they tend to see folklore, like the Romantic poets before them, as a refuge for the embattled soul. It is the appealing, distinctive way of life of their grandparents, now lost or disappearing, imagined as healthier, more authentic, closer to nature, less troubled and, why not, more ‘magical’. The tales those grandparents told must, surely, have held lost, secret teachings that could open a door onto an older world, more real than our own.

Unsurprisingly, two hundred years later, this old Romantic conception of folklore has been extensively revised, challenged and expanded. Yet its idealisation contains something beautiful that need not be discarded altogether: the capacity to imagine, create, form communities and connect with something larger than ourselves through the stories we tell one another. Many readers first come to folktales and their genres with this poetic feeling. For that reason alone, it is worth keeping the flame alight in these dark times of increasing digitisation of life… if only for a little longer.

Leaving this idealist view aside, the deliberately broad definition I will adopt at Llegendàrium is that folklore is a deeply human way for particular groups to share beliefs, culture, games, information or traditions creatively, through speech, music, customary practices, behaviour and material objects, among other forms. Every group may have its own folklore—a trade, a village, a culture or an association, for example—and an individual may belong to several groups, which may or may not share folkloric elements.

Folklore, moreover, tends to be informal, outside the sphere of elite or mass culture. It may or may not be countercultural, but it is often unofficial and non-institutional. The act of creation and performance through which members of a group share folklore, continually reshaping it over time in a dynamic, interactive process, is as fundamental as what is narrated. Folklore also depends on the context of the group or community, with its own ways of thinking, beliefs, shared experiences and internal customs. Finally, each group’s folklore is integral to its identity. It helps members define themselves, locate themselves in the world and form a distinct collective (Sims and Stephens 2011).

I need to narrow the term, however, because Llegendàrium does not cover every kind of folklore. My focus is narrative or verbal folklore. It encompasses a great many genres, including jokes, anecdotes, personal, family and local stories, idle talk and gossip passed from parents to children, nicknames, verbal or material customs such as ‘touch wood’, and much else besides. Narrowing the field further, Llegendàrium will concentrate on particular genres of narrative folklore, perhaps the best-loved traditional ones: tales, including folktales, legends, fables, ballads when set to music, and a few smaller genres.

A compendium of human experience

A tale can simply be a short written narrative. As for tales from oral tradition, however, the best general definition I can offer is that they form a compendium of experiences passed down across hundreds of generations by peoples throughout the world. Ever since the emergence of ‘consciousness’, whatever that means, when we began to relate to one another symbolically, we have passed on an immense collection of experiences of all kinds, encoded as stories. This inheritance means that there are tales for every experience we have had, are having and might yet have. There are tales for us, too, here in the twenty-first century.

Some tales are centuries or millennia old. Others are only months old and vanish almost as soon as they appear, especially today. Still others are old tales that return, somehow, in new clothes and new forms while retaining an ancient narrative core. Old and new alike, these tales speak to our feelings and thoughts, and we can recognise ourselves in them. People in every age, for example, have needed hope in difficult times, and so there are tales of hope. Nor should we dismiss stories told for entertainment. Everyone has wanted to laugh or feel afraid at some point in life; that is why comic and frightening tales are as old as humanity.

However much Western cynicism tells us that we have seen it all and exhausted every possibility, we have not. Human life may have changed in its technology, tools, science and medicine, and perhaps even in how we interpret the world and look at ourselves. Yet some experiences endure across the millennia. Everyone has loved or suffered heartbreak. Everyone has suffered or inflicted abuse. Everyone has endured injustice or terrible accidents that seem meaningless, or enjoyed astonishing strokes of luck. Everyone has loved and hated, envied and desired, made mistakes and struggled to put them right or, overwhelmed, surrendered to tragedy. In the twenty-first century and in prehistory alike. All this, and much more, is found in tales.

Across the centuries, oral transmission has sifted the golden grains of human experience into tales. It has discarded some elements, incorporated others and concentrated what people on every continent have felt and thought into stories that are often allegorical or metaphorical. Every people in the world has told tales, made from a thousand perspectives and a thousand voices that resonate within each of us. As the American folklorist William A. Wilson wrote about folklore more broadly, through it we can learn what it means to be human. ‘It is this attempt to discover the basis of our common humanity, the imperatives of our human existence’ (Wilson 1988, pp. 157–158).

Giandomenico Tiepolo, The Storyteller, 1773–1777.
Blanton Museum of Art. Public domain.

Tales in oral tradition

Tales belong to ‘narrative transmitted through oral tradition’, a concept with three components, each of which raises questions of definition. The first is ‘narrative’.

To ‘narrate’ is to tell someone, or a group of people, about an event, with a more or less dramatic structure. A ‘narrative’ is the body of events narrated. It often follows a three-part structure—beginning, middle and end—but this is not a universal rule. Some less common genres, which I will address later in this introductory series, have no such structure or depart considerably from it. Legends, folktales, fables and ballads, the four genres I will discuss most often at Llegendàrium, may follow this classical structure, but they can also take much shorter, cumulative, episodic or open-ended forms. In tales, the classical three-part structure is indeed the most common (Aristotle, Poetics, 1450b) and, for many reasons, fits the way our own thinking works and the way we look at life and ourselves. (Campbell 2008, part I, chapters I–III)

The second word is ‘tradition’, probably the most contentious of the three. At Llegendàrium, as my own working criterion, I will understand tradition as something passed on with continuity and carrying values shared by a human group or community. This is not, however, a threshold universally accepted in contemporary folklore studies. Sims and Stephens (2011) propose understanding tradition both as what is transmitted and as the dynamic process of transmitting, selecting and recreating it. The key concept is continuity, which may span generations or, sometimes, only years or months. Handler and Linnekin (1984) take this idea further. Tradition is not a bounded object inherited intact but an interpretive process in which the present selects and reconstructs the past according to the interests of the group that sustains it. For this reason, they consider the distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘spurious’ or false traditions too simplistic.

Whatever the many interpretations of tradition that have been or continue to be proposed, when a community recognises a practice or a tale as its own, it usually becomes part of its identity, whether the community is a neighbourhood, a town or a wider cultural group such as a country. A community feels that its tradition and body of traditional narratives are its own and unique, whether or not they really are. It also tends to believe that its tradition is ancient and its tales centuries old, though that need not be so.

There is, however, a close identification between tradition and community. Tradition helps shape who the community’s members are and how they relate to one another and to other communities. The French ethnologist Jean Cuisenier sums this up by describing tradition as ‘a mode of transmitting and appropriating knowledge, practices and values’ within a human group (Cuisenier 1995, p. 100). Thus, if we have said that traditional tales have a universal human dimension, they also have a dimension rooted in a cultural community and a set of quite specific values. That is, in a way of understanding life and of relating to one another and to the world. Tales can therefore be read on many levels, from the most universal—the feelings and ideas all humans share—to the most particular and local, with values specific to a given culture. The latter is especially clear in legends, less so in folktales.

The final component is ‘oral’. This seems the simplest. It means that a story has passed from one person’s voice to another person who listens. Despite its apparent simplicity, it is often the most neglected or misrepresented component. At first tales were passed on orally simply because writing was not yet widespread. Storytelling could involve music, performance and theatre, such as shadow puppetry, or material aids such as illustrated prints, blackboards and other visual objects. Oral transmission persisted until relatively recent times because most people could neither read nor write. In the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere in Europe and the Americas, blind itinerant storytellers commonly recounted tales and other stories, often accompanied by an assistant, music or illustrated prints.

Yet many ‘traditions’, tales and customs now presented as oral have never been oral at all. In any case, oral transmission is not ‘pure’. We must also account for its often decisive encounters with other human forms of communication and art, including dance, music, religion and literature, with major authors such as Straparola, Basile and Perrault, and today with newer narrative forms such as cinema, video games and the internet. Tales and oral narrative more generally do not form a closed world. A story may move from speech to writing, from writing to the screen, and from the screen back into conversation. Like every human activity, storytelling is connected to everything people are and do, especially within a shared group or community (Dundes 1965).

Oral and printed literature in particular have nourished each other for centuries. In a work that sparked controversy at the time, Bottigheimer (2009) challenged the idea that the literary fairy tale always derives from an anonymous and exclusively oral peasant tradition. From a different perspective, Zipes (2012) stresses these stories’ ability to adapt to new media and contexts, something I keep firmly in mind at Llegendàrium. This interaction does not diminish oral storytelling. On the contrary, it helps explain some of its vitality. These are other voices travelling across the page and joining those passed from mouth to mouth.

This perspective requires us to see storytelling as a communicative event, not simply as a text. Bauman (1984) understood it as a communicative performance shaped by the interaction of expressive resources, the narrator’s skill, participants’ aims and the particular situation. Every performance may therefore change a tale’s form and meaning. ‘The emergent quality of performance resides in the interplay between communicative resources, individual competence, and goals of the participants’ (Bauman 1984, p. 38). Two almost identical transcriptions may thus have carried different nuances or values when told by different people, to different audiences or under different circumstances.

Thompson (1977) offers a wide-ranging comparison of traditional tale forms and several ideas about oral tradition which, although dated in some respects, remain valuable in others.

‘It is clear then that the oral story need not always have been oral. But when it once habituates itself to being passed on by word of mouth it undergoes the same treatment as all other tales at the command of the raconteur. It becomes something to tell to an audience, or at least to a listener, not something to read. Its effects are no longer produced indirectly by association with words written or printed on a page, but directly through facial expression and gesture and repetition and recurrent patterns that generations have tested and found effective.’ (Thompson 1977, p. 5).

In Catalonia and elsewhere in Europe, the term ‘popular’ is often added to this definition. Historically, ‘the people’ have been associated with the lower classes in contrast to the aristocracy or upper classes. That identification, however, is too narrow for folklore studies today. Dundes (1965) argued that a folk can be any group that shares at least one common factor and develops traditions of its own: a family, a trade, a neighbourhood, a company or an online community, for example. ‘Popular’, then, does not mean only rural, old, dying, inferior and subordinate—or rooted and superior—as early folklorists tended to think. It refers to what a group recognises, recreates and transmits, bearing in mind the wide variety of human groups (Oring 1986).

In Catalan academic studies, moreover, a compelling term is often used to approach folklore: ‘ethnopoetics’. It proposes the study of verbal art with attention not only to the text, the narrative item being studied—the poetics—but above all to the context in which it is brought to life (Oriol 2002) and to the character of the human group inhabiting that context, the ethnos.

At Llegendàrium, then, I will understand tales as narratives with a more or less three-part dramatic structure, told orally and creatively to another person or group. Through continued transmission, they may become part of a community’s cultural identity and of how that community interprets and interacts with the world.

Oral narrative—the act of telling, remembering, reshaping and passing on stories—is also part of human experience. Everything people live through therefore changes it. There are no entirely clear boundaries. They are often porous and shifting. Living folklore changes constantly and draws on influences from everywhere. It differs from an item preserved in an archive. Such an item can be an invaluable source for research and can even return to circulation, but a fixed document cannot replace the act of telling. At the same time, for a community to consider a tale worth passing on, it must be able to recognise that tale as its own. Tradition is therefore both conservative and dynamic (Sims and Stephens 2011). To understand this tension, we need to examine the setting in which tales arise, are told and change: the perennial question of context.

The importance of context

Tales often recount events that are more or less unreal or fantastic—at least in wonder tales, though realistic tales also exist—and can express shared truths, values and conflicts. In the European wonder tale, Lüthi (1982) showed how distance from everyday reality makes it possible to explore major themes of human existence in a stylised form. As he concluded, ‘In the fairy tale as a form we see united the decisive poles of existence: the confined and the expansive, stillness and motion, law and freedom, unity and multiplicity’ (Lüthi 1982, p. 78). This observation is useful for the folktale, but it should not be extended to every genre. The legend, for example, tends to be more local and has a shorter ‘shelf life’ because it is more subject to social change than the folktale. At the same time, legends tend to be even closer to everyday experience. In every case, we must consider the context of a narrative tradition and the roles it plays for the community that keeps it alive.

Traditions and folktales, like individuals, do not exist in a vacuum. They are sustained by a particular human setting, built from a multitude of elements: a community’s economic circumstances, occupations and social divisions, religious and ideological beliefs, educational, ethical and moral values, the historical period, the land on which people live—as a physical, geological and ecological reality—and even the climate. These and other material conditions provide much of the ground from which traditions grow. In turn, traditions interact with other practices within the community and those of neighbouring communities—in the modern world, with global networks too. Exchanges continue even in conditions of relative social isolation. The folklore and tales of coastal communities, for example, have features that distinguish them from those of communities further inland. Those told in upper-class and aristocratic circles also differ from the folklore and stories of lower-class people or itinerants. This does not mean these groups have no shared tales, internal values or folklore, since one person may belong to several groups. Groups themselves change and interact. Moreover, all groups share their human condition.

Within this social structure, tales take on different nuances, develop and circulate in distinctive ways, and acquire colours of their own. A community feels that a tale belongs to it because its particular retelling does. Here again we encounter the universal and the local, which must be considered together and are equally valid. It makes no difference that the same folktale or legend is told in twenty other communities. Each may tell it with nuances and values drawn from its own setting. There may be thirty, sixty or a hundred versions of The Devil’s Bridge or John the Bear, but each is told in a particular way within a particular village or family, just as a grandmother or uncle once told it. Human experience moves in expanding circles, from what is most intimate to what is most distant. These levels remain related to one another, and their differences reward close attention, because what unites all their voices is as fascinating as what makes each voice unique.

For a community—whether a family or a country—to keep a tradition alive, that tradition must fit a context that is always changing. In many past settings, change may have been gradual. Elsewhere, conquest, epidemics, migration, economic upheaval or forced displacement accelerated it traumatically. Oral traditions may change over decades or centuries, but they can also change quickly. In either case, the generations that pass them on are not always aware of the process. Something can appear to have ‘always been this way’ once living memory no longer reaches earlier versions. The German scholar Hermann Bausinger wrote that ‘Tradition does not consist in seeking out and unearthing the past, but in continuous transmission and handing down’ (Bausinger 2005, p. 98). For Bausinger, age alone does not define a tradition. In fact, he reverses the causal relationship. A tale does not matter to a group because it has been transmitted for centuries. Rather, it can be transmitted for centuries precisely because successive groups find it meaningful to their identity and continue to renew it. For this to happen, tales and traditions more generally must fulfil particular functions.

A fieldwork expedition for the Obra del Cançoner Popular de Catalunya.
CEDOC. CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 ES licence.

What tales do for us

Here I am concerned not with the internal narrative functions studied by the influential Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp (1895–1970) in Morphology of the Folktale (1928), but with the social functions of tales: what they mean to narrators and listeners and the part they play in the community that tells them. For Propp, a function is an action defined by its place in the plot. Here I use ‘function’ to mean what a narrative does in social life. Exploring what a tale means to a group, and therefore why it matters to its members, is an old question of functionalism that remains relevant.

When circumstances change, whether through gradual social transformation or a sudden, violent event, traditions may adapt while retaining part of their structure and meaning, change until they mean something else, or cease to be transmitted. No single mechanism accounts for all these outcomes, but the functions a tradition fulfils are fundamental to understanding its persistence, transformation or disappearance. Tales, moreover, rarely pass through oral tradition in a straight line. They gather materials from here and there in a constant, dynamic process. Building on Bausinger’s definition, the folklorist Günter Wiegelmann adds that tradition involves passing cultural goods and values from one generation to the next. For Wiegelmann, the process of transmission and what is transmitted can differ, because transmission can be passive or active. A practice survives because ‘it has always been done this way’, or is deliberately adopted because people consider it valuable (Wiegelmann 1977).

Whether it stays the same or adapts, a narrative’s continued life within a group is closely tied to the functions it performs. Thus, when people repeat a tradition simply because ‘it has always been done this way’ and have forgotten why, this is often a sign of cultural ageing. The group that transmits it is probably in a state of demographic and cultural decline. It has failed to adapt the tradition to its present circumstances, so that tradition loses the functions it once performed. The tale or practice then becomes a decorative object, experienced as quaint. Eventually, its transmission ends along with the disappearance of that rigid community, which has also failed to create new forms suited to its changed circumstances. Sometimes this last stage goes hand in hand with the hollow commercialisation of traditions as objects of quick, performative consumption. Identity becomes a mask to be sold, bought, worn and discarded when a more appealing one arrives.

Similarly, Gerndt warns that claims about the origins, age and transformations of folktales must remain provisional. He locates their value instead in their continuing relevance: ‘They ultimately derive their value from their existence in the present and not from their past’ (Gerndt 2024). This is why the commercialisation of folktales and folklore more generally often draws on a more or less concealed, pseudo-poetic nostalgia, presenting traditional narratives as fantasy rather than something lived and shared. The result is rather like selling archaeological artefacts, museum pieces that nobody truly feels belong to them anymore, however much Romantic idealisation, at times rather sentimental, suggests otherwise. People want them to be real, alive and passed on. Yet, because the community that once transmitted them and its context have disappeared or soon will, those same traditions are quietly rejected even as they are idealised, and relegated to childishness and aesthetic decoration.

Functions are one of the links between narrative tradition and human experience. For a community to keep a tradition alive, it must fit into a setting made up of many elements and remain meaningful. It must speak to the group’s experience, to what its members live through, what they hope to experience or become in an ideal world, and what they reject. Identity is thus formed through an interplay of lived experience, what we are, what we are not, what we want to be and what we do not want to be. The identity-forming function of traditions, and hence of tales, can draw a group together and distinguish it from its neighbours, who may be portrayed as everything the group does not wish to be. This opposition can be more or less aggressive, as between two neighbouring towns or city districts, and contributes to the construction of both identities. The educational function transmits values, from the most basic—survival, caution or self-protection, as in The Three Little Pigs, often addressed to children—to the most sophisticated.

Identity and education are not the only functions. Bascom (1965) identified four broad ones: entertainment or escape, validation of a culture’s institutions and beliefs, education, and the maintenance of norms through social pressure or control. The list is not exhaustive. It seems rather short today, since there are many others, but it helps us organise much of the evidence. There are religious functions; ways of easing social tensions that go beyond entertainment, as in jokes or absurd tales about comic characters, sometimes with political or subversive undertones; ways of coming to terms with tragedy, such as death or illness; and many others that may be less obvious. Moreover, a single story often serves more than one function, on several levels.

Tales in the Western world

If we see traditions as living organisms, they can only be cultivated, grow and flourish if their social and human setting provides favourable conditions and they continue to mean something to those who practise them. Otherwise, they die or never quite take root. Today, circumstances change so quickly that we must reconsider what we mean by tradition and even by a tale. This does not mean that tradition has disappeared. Studies of contemporary folklore show that it is also created and recreated in urban, professional and digital settings (Dundes 1965; Sims and Stephens 2011), while Dégh (2001) demonstrated the vitality of legend in thoroughly technological societies.

Yet some cultural practices regarded as traditions circulate as trivial consumer goods or fetishes, with little connection to the roots of those who consume them. In Westernised societies, extensive mobility, fragile relationships, destructive alienation at work and commodification may encourage people to consume certain ‘traditions’ as personal masks, performative outfits to be exchanged for others tomorrow. Here cultural industries and ruling groups can establish or reinforce systems of values—or the appearance of values, empty forms made to be bought and sold, where values are absent.

One of the social struggles of our time lies between, on the one hand, the pull towards an uprooted and solitary individual, subject to mass production, digitisation and the addictive consumption of vicarious human experience through screens, and, on the other, the desire to grow, live and develop within communities bound by shared affinities, in a close, personal, organic setting, whether in the heart of a city or the remotest village. The opposition is not absolute. A person can belong to local and digital communities, and both can create living traditions. After all, human beings live by telling and hearing stories. We make ourselves through the stories we tell and hear, and we are always telling ourselves the story of our own lives, through which we construct memory. (Bruner 1986, pp. 11–43) We tend to believe that our account of what we have lived through is objective, because that is how memory works, but it is not. As in Rashomon, the same event, experienced by four people, gives rise to four different stories. (Bruner 1991)

In any case, what we consider traditional cannot be kept alive by a group’s willpower alone. It endures because it is born or takes root in a substrate—a context in which it fulfils functions—that gives it what it needs to grow. Otherwise, at best, it resembles a greenhouse plant in a pot, isolated and kept alive artificially by subsidies or by a closed group that waters and feeds it. When there is no one left to care for it, it will be abandoned, dry out and die. If narrative folklore has shown us anything over the centuries, it is its capacity to adapt and continue to be transmitted, even under extreme conditions, in the face of attempts to manipulate, censor, subordinate it to the ruling ideology, instrumentalise it, annihilate it or condemn it to oblivion. The worst that can happen to it is simply that people cease to pass it on. Yet its power to change is like a seed. Even when it is no longer transmitted orally, it may survive in other media and wait for the right moment to grow again. Imagination is part of our innermost nature. Though a legion of screens, a thousand pills and the most sophisticated propaganda may extinguish our capacity to imagine, it will return when rain and sunlight return.