Proverbs, riddles, and charms

Study, collection, and preservation

Learn about the study of folklore and its academic discipline at University College Cork

See all videos for this article
As abundant as folk literature is and has been, its investigation has been seriously undertaken only within the past two or three centuries. The principal difficulty has been the assembling of material on which to base such studies. Its very oral nature makes it impossible for one person to be acquainted firsthand with more than an extremely small part of this activity. It is only when some sort of written record has been made of the oral material that any general studies are possible.
For the still unlettered peoples, the reports of ethnologists and anthropologists, as a part of their general studies of the cultures of widely distributed groups, have often given good accounts of folk literature and have frequently furnished texts of material they heard. Though these reports are extremely uneven and often fragmentary, they do give a sampling of the literary expression of many and diverse parts of the world.
When attention is shifted to the ancient world before the use of writing, scholars are almost entirely dependent on analogies from the unlettered groups just mentioned. It will never be known what tales were told or what songs were sung by the builders of the Egyptian pyramids or the temples in Sumer, but it seems fair to assume that even then these peoples were not silent. Of course it must be remembered that they did eventually develop a written literature, so that the analogy with modern unlettered peoples may not be completely valid.
For folk literature since the development of writing, scholars are dependent on several things. There may be specific references in literary documents to the existence of particular tales or songs and often to their manner of production. The Old Testament is a good source for these, and both the Odyssey and Beowulf contain good pictures of the performances of folk minstrels and bards.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Many collections of folktales and legends, of lyric and heroic songs, and of riddles and proverbs have been recovered directly from popular tradition within the past three or four centuries. When the collection of this material began, it was nearly always rewritten in the prevailing literary fashion. Excellent examples of such rewritten tales will be found in the collections of the 17th-century Italian Giambattista Basile, the 17th-century Frenchman Charles Perrault, and various German writers such as Johann Karl August Musäus and Clemens Brentano in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Brothers Grimm with their Kinder und Hausmärchen (1812–15) have as their ideal the exact recording of tales as heard from oral tellers, though it is clear that many stories in their famous work are not folk literature at all. In the same way, collections of folk songs and ballads were severely edited well into the 19th century.