folklore

1. The traditional beliefs, myths, tales, and practices of a people, transmitted orally.
2. The comparative study of folk knowledge and culture. Also called folkloristics.
3. 1. A body of widely accepted but usually specious notions about a place, a group, or an institution: Rumors of their antics became part of the folklore of Hollywood.
   2. A popular but unfounded belief.

noun

A body of traditional beliefs and notions accumulated about a particular subject: legend, lore, myth, mythology, mythos, tradition. See knowledge/ignorance.

folklore, a modern term for the body of traditional customs, superstitions, stories, dances, and songs that have been adopted and maintained within a given community by processes of repetition not reliant on the written word. Along with folk songs and folktales, this broad category of cultural forms embraces all kinds of legends, riddles, jokes, proverbs, games, charms, omens, spells, and rituals, especially those of pre‐literate societies or social classes. Those forms of verbal expression that are handed on from one generation or locality to the next by word of mouth are said to constitute an oral tradition.

Adjective: folkloric.

For more information on folklore, visit Britannica.com.

Writing in The Athenaeum on 22 August 1846, the antiquarian W. J. Thoms invited readers to record ‘the manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs … of olden time … what we in England designate as Popular Antiquities or Popular Literature (though by-the-by it is more a Lore than a Literature, and would be more aptly described by a good Saxon compound, Folk-Lore—the Lore of the People).' The word thus casually tossed out caught on, and has been adopted into many other languages; its crispness is an advantage, but its implications pose problems. Until recently, ‘folk’ was not used inclusively, but restricted to lower-class and relatively uneducated rural communities, whose life was thought to be static, untainted by urban sophistication, and thus likely to preserve archaic items. Tradition was defined as information or custom handed on unchanged over many generations; the present was of little interest in itself, only valued as a pointer to the past. ‘Lore’ too was a restrictive concept; it covered oral genres, beliefs, and behaviour, excluding all that comprises material culture: crafts, tools, working practices, buildings, furnishings, decorative arts, etc.

These points show up plainly in Charlotte Burne's definition in The Handbook of Folk-Lore (1913), 1:

The word … [is] the generic term under which the traditional Beliefs, Customs, Stories, Songs and Sayings current among backward peoples, or retained by the uncultured classes of more advanced peoples, are comprehended and included …. In short, it covers everything which makes part of the mental equipment of the folk as distinguished from their technical skill. It is not the form of the plough which excites the attention of the folklorist, but the rites practised by the ploughman when putting it into the soil…

Every group bound together by common interests and purposes, whether educated or uneducated, rural or urban, possesses a body of traditions which may be called its folklore. Folklore in general develops when people come together in groups for communal activities; these may be religious, cultural, or social in character, or mark events in the natural world, or combine several functions (e.g. harvest festivals, May Day and solstice celebrations, etc.). In Britain, as industrialization and mechanization gathered pace, old agrarian traditions gradually declined as country people migrated to the towns. It was against this background of urbanization that many Victorian folklorists and photographers endeavoured to preserve what they saw as valuable remnants of the old traditions. English folklore began to emerge as a subject worthy of study and research, encouraged by the foundation of the Folklore Society in 1868, the introduction of scholarly journals such as Folklore (f. 1890), and academic conventions like the 1891 International Folklore Congress in London. Members of the Folklore Society included archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians.

From the 1860s, many amateur and professional photographers recorded traditional customs and events in lantern slides and photographs. Subjects included local fairs, morris dancing, beating the bounds, and illustrated legends of ancient sites. Photographs were often published in popular books and in postcard form. Lantern slides were used to illustrate talks on various aspects of folklore to new national and civic ‘scientific societies’. The Oxford photographer and lanternist Henry Taunt, who had a deep interest in local folklore and archaeology, published photographically illustrated works on ‘Merrie England’ and prehistoric monuments like the Rollright Stones. Henry Underhill (1855-1920), an Oxford grocer, was an amateur folklorist who produced his own hand-coloured lantern slides and photographs for local societies. Large-scale operators like Francis Frith acknowledged the historical and commercial value of folkloric events and objects in their catalogues of views and postcards. Today, interest in retrieving, preserving, and making accessible this form of visual culture can be measured by the many collections being made available on the Internet by centres for local county studies and academic institutes.

— Megan Price

Bibliography

• Brown, B. (ed.), The England of Henry Taunt, Victorian Photographer (1973)

A very rich body of folklore survives in Ireland, owing to the country's position on the western periphery of Europe, an innately conservative element in Irish tradition, and the importance which that tradition attaches to oral narration. Irish folk narrative may be divided into the following categories: native hero-tales of mythical or literary origin; adaptations of international folk-tales; oral legends which purport to describe occurrences in ordinary life; and numerous minor forms such as verse anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. The hero-tales and longer types of international folk-tale are told quite formally and are found almost exclusively in Irish. Shorter or more conversational genres, such as ghost and fairy legends and a wide variety of humorous lore, flourish to an equal extent in Irish and English. Folk renditions of stories from the Ulster cycle have their sources in manuscript retellings from the post-medieval period. The most popular of these have been accounts of the youthful deeds of Cú Chulainn and of Deirdre (see Longes mac nUislenn). Folklore concerning Fionn mac Cumhaill is very common. The international wonder-tale, telling of events in a world long past, was the dominant genre in the repertoire of the Irish story-teller. Hundreds of versions of these wonder-tales have been collected in Ireland, such as the story of the dragon-slayer who rescues a princess and upstages a dishonest rival. There were many forms of short oral legends, involving accounts of marvellous events interrupting normal life; or occurrences with a supernatural origin, such as the lore of rivers which claim their victims once a year. The rich fairy lore of Ireland [see sídh] is the subject of many oral legends. Stories about Christ followed European tradition, for the most part; and legends concerning saints derived from Irish and European medieval literature, and from local devotion. The lore of the saints Patrick, Brigit, and Colum Cille was widespread. Cormac mac Airt, Brian Bóroime, and more recent figures such as Oliver Cromwell and Daniel O'Connell figure in the legends, while more localized lore concerns warriors, outlaws, tyrants, sportsmen, clergymen, and individuals such as Biddy Early, the healer from Co. Clare. Especially popular were stories about poets, such as Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin; and humorous anecdotes regarding a variety of learned individuals, such as Jonathan Swift or John Philpot Curran. Much folklore gathered about festivals, such as Lughnasa, Samhain, and Easter. The collection of Irish folklore began in the early 19th cent. Thomas Crofton Croker's anthologies were based on material gathered in Munster. Patrick Kennedy's collections had a more accurate style and greater precision. The American-Irish anthropologist and linguist Jeremiah Curtin scrupulously collected a wide variety of narrative from native Irish speakers. W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory collected and published material from Hiberno-English narration. William Larminie and Douglas Hyde presented the original Irish of their informants as well as reliable translations. Séamus Ó Duilearga and his colleagues in the Irish Folklore Commission brought high standards of linguistic accuracy to the field of study.

Bibliography

Seán Ó Súilleabháin, A Handbook of Irish Folklore (1942).

In spite of its relatively short history, the United States has developed a rich seam of folklore that reflects both the nation's rapid transformation from agrarian to industrial and the multicultural society which has emerged from that transformation. Whether it be Mormons in Utah, Pennsylvania Amish, Cajuns from Louisiana, Appalachian mountaineers, African Americans from the Mississippi Delta, Mexican Americans in California and Texas, Minnesotans of Scandinavian extraction, New England Yankees, Chinese Americans in San Francisco, or Jews, Italians, and Irish from New York, Chicago, and Boston, America's heterogeneity, its geography, and its regional characteristics ensure that a diverse and constantly evolving culture contains a folk tradition that renders the United States unique among the industrialized nations. Whereas European countries can situate folk traditions within medieval time spheres, and Japan, for example, possesses ancient customs that represent a purism that links all of its people, America's folk heritage, its unwritten voice, has been aided, if not configured, by a cultural cross-fertilization that has seen different groups borrow from and interact with each other. Although in relative terms the United States can be seen as a young nation, it is also the world's oldest existing fully fledged democracy, and the vigorous nature of America's accelerated metamorphosis has ensured a vibrant folk culture that has manifested itself through various mediums including art and popular culture. It is therefore fitting that the convergent forces existing within a country of extremes should emanate from the "folk" themselves, promoting a national identity that continues to resonate throughout the globe.

American Folk Culture in the Nineteenth Century

The term "folklore" was first coined in 1846 by an Englishman, William John Thoms, and was a phrase used to describe the study of the ancient system of customs and beliefs practiced by common people. Subsequently in other nations, folklore became a means of establishing a unified national culture that also included language, music, and literature. To an extent these criteria applied to the United States in the nineteenth century as it began to forge an identity of its own. In contrast, though, to some nations in Europe where aristocrats sought proof of their own nationhood through the customs and language of the peasant class, America's literate population, already accustomed to a communicative spirit generated by newspapers, periodicals, and books, rejected the concept of an autocratic ruling elite. This is not to say that there was not already a burgeoning folkloric element rooted in Old World mythology such as the witch tales of New England and Appalachia. In general, though, tales and ballads about trappers, hunters, explorers, adventurers, and a myriad of liminal American characters that had experienced captivity, revolution, and the wilderness meant that folklore had taken on an American guise which embodied the country's exceptionalism.

There were also existing aboriginal cultures predicated almost entirely on the oral tradition. However, it was the Native Americans themselves who became objectified within the wider society while their culture remained firmly enclosed within the tribal environment. Subsequently, their myths and traditions remained, and still remain, detached and ethically different from the main body of the nation's folk traditions.

By the mid-nineteenth century, it was increasingly clear that the divisions perceived to exist between folk culture and mass culture were beginning to be blurred. American folk characters of that time embodied the principles of individualism and liberty while perpetuating ideas of nationhood and anti-elitism. All-American heroes such as Davy Crockett and Kit Carson were mythologized through almanacs, newspapers, and dime novels that anticipated the Superman comic boom a century later. The frontier and the West continued to be a source of fascination well into the twentieth century as Crockett and Carson plus a plethora of Western characters from Jesse James to Calamity Jane were, through the medium of the moving picture, ensconced forever within the nation's consciousness.

As well as influencing the course of popular culture, folklore was, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, a topic that required intellectual pursuit. As anthropologists, ethnologists, and historians attempted to situate an unwritten past through songs, myths, yarns, aphorisms, games, and numerous oral histories, folklore became very much a product of modernity. By the time the American Folklore Society (AFS) was founded in 1888, the United States had suffered a civil war and an economic slump; it had also undergone an accelerated industrial revolution that had seen its cities grow from cow towns and industrial ports to sprawling urban landscapes where immigrants and refugees from southern and eastern Europe brought their own folk traditions. The AFS's membership was drawn from mainly middle-class professionals who saw an opportunity for scientific research that reached outside the university curriculum. By the 1890s, the AFS had branches in cities across the United States, eclipsing by far similar organizations in Europe. It would be easy to view such an institution as emblematic of a subliminal yearning for a simpler, preindustrial America idealized through the rose-tinted spectacles of a socially and economically privileged, predominantly eastern, professional class. However, prominent folklorists of the late nineteenth century, for example T. F. Crane and Lee J. Vance, would offer the unearthing of "primitive" materials as valid evidence of humanity's advancement. In this sense, it could be argued, folklore was intrinsic to the modernizing process as folk specialists set about researching isolated communities in order to promote the benefits of what came to be known as the Gilded Age.

African American Folklore

Collectors and folklorists such as the first president of the AFS, Francis James Child, who compiled an extensive catalogue of British-based folk songs the final volume of which was published in 1898; Cecil Sharpe, an Englishman who made several trips to the Appalachians between 1916 and 1918 to document the "Elizabethan" ballads of Kentucky; and Vance Randolph, who initially visited the Ozarks of Arkansas during 1920 and discovered a powerful British influence within the local folk culture, provided a case for those who insisted there was no such thing as a quintessentially American folk heritage. Thus, even in those environments relatively unaffected by mass culture and industrialization, extant folk traditions were unequivocally linked to Great Britain, suggesting a regional homogeneity that was untypical of America as a whole. In this context, how does one assess African American culture and its contribution to an identifiable American folklore?

The unavoidable fact that African Americans were denied, through slavery, the educational and economic advantages enjoyed by the majority of U.S. society provided the conditions for the birth of a vibrant and inventive folk culture. Although informed by both African and European elements, in essence what emerged from the plantations of the South resembled conventional notions of folklore inasmuch that it was a mythology steeped in an oral tradition of trickster tales, animal stories, and work songs. Fundamentally, whereas the rest of America had an already-established written tradition, most slaves were never allowed the opportunity to achieve any adequate level of literacy. Of course there are exceptions, given the proliferation of written slave narratives, but such instances are relatively rare.

In contrast to Native Americans, whose traditions and myths were never allowed to enter into the dominant realm, African Americans, partly because of language and Christian belief, possessed cultural traits that were instantly recognizable to whites. As the songs of Stephen Foster and the blackface minstrelsy craze that proved to be the nation's most popular form of entertainment for the best part of a hundred years would help to testify, there was a long-held fascination with black America. Though distorted by sentimentalism, parody, and racist caricature, it was a fascination which allowed for a certain amount of cultural cross-fertilization.

Beginning with the publication in 1867 of William F. Allen, Charles P. Ware, and Lucy M. Garrison's Slave Songs, there would be a steady flow of African American–oriented folk material that would be absorbed into white society through various mediums including music, literature, and the pages of the Journal of American Folklore. In 1871 the Fisk Jubilee Singers were first assembled to perform Negro spirituals. The Fisks, who refined the spiritual to make it acceptable as a serious art form to white audiences, would subsequently travel to England, appearing before Queen Victoria. Mark Twain and the Czech composer Antonín Dvo[UNK]ák, who embellished his New World Symphony (1893) with the sacred folk melodies of former slaves, admired the Negro spirituals as truly great American music.

In popular fiction, Joel Chandler Harris's chronicling of slave folk tales, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, published in 1880, provided a predominantly white readership with an amusing foray into the world of the plantation. In writing the Uncle Remus stories, Harris incorporated the dialect of the Gullah islanders, an isolated community that resided off the coast of South Carolina. Believed to have retained many African oral inflections, the islanders were of some interest to folklorists. Years later, George Gershwin would live among the Gullah people while researching his 1934 "folk opera" Porgy and Bess, a musical version of DuBose and Dorothy Heyward's Porgy. Dubose Heyward, incidentally, was a white southerner who spent years observing the folk characteristics of the Gullah community in Charleston.

Although white novelists were initially responsible for illustrating the folkways of black America, it would be African American authors who would successfully combine the oral traditions surfacing from the nineteenth century with modernist literary forms. Although Paul Laurence Dunbar's dialect verse drew national acclaim in the early 1900s, it would be those black writers and poets who rose to prominence in the wake of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance who would successfully intertextualize trickster tales, folk songs, and other folkloric elements into their art. Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, and latterly Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison are all examples of African Americans who would evoke black oral traditions in their written work. Thus, African American literature has taken from folklore in order to give historical license to a people whose past had hitherto only been written through the eyes of the enslaver.

The interchange between the black folk tradition and the white literary tradition suggests a synthesis that transcends racial barriers. To an extent, this is often repeated in American folk music. In the South, historically the most racially segregated region in the United States, there was (and is) a huge public domain of folk songs that have continually traversed the color line. Songs that seem to typify an America undergoing industrialization and urbanization, such as "Casey Jones," "Stagolee," "Frankie and Johnny," and "John Henry," have passed back and forth between the races only to be claimed by both. The South has produced white blues singers and black hillbilly groups, while jazz emerged from its African American folk roots in New Orleans to become a quintessentially American art form. White country music owes much to African American blues. In 1926, one of the first artists to perform on the Grand Ole Opry was a black harmonica player called DeFord Bailey, who improvised nineteenth-century folk tunes such as "Fox Chase" which he had learned from his father, a former slave from East Tennessee. White hillbilly's first million-selling artist, Jimmie Rodgers, who developed his musical style working with African Americans on the railroad, produced a number of highly successful blues sides between 1927 and 1933, while African American blues singers like Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) and Blind Lemon Jefferson would include traditional white forms in their repertoires.

Put in this context, one could certainly argue that the interchange between southern black and white folk traditions, especially in folk song, produced a synthesis of sorts which could almost be defined as a single southern folk culture.

Folklore, Mass Culture, and Multiculturalism

The blurring of folklore and popular culture that was hinted at during the nineteenth century through the depiction of folk characters in dime novels, almanacs, and newspapers took on another dimension with the technological advancement that succeeded World War I. Radio, the phonograph, and the cinema all provided a facility for mass communication in an era when the unfettered consumerism of the postwar Jazz Age was followed by the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. During this period, America was becoming a more fluid society, with African Americans and rural whites from the South migrating to the urban centers of the North and the Midwest. Of course, these migrants brought their folk customs and their traditions with them. Ironically, as many Americans became effectively displaced, they developed a keener sense of their own regional heritage. For example, blues artists who migrated to Chicago during the 1920s would, in many of their songs, express a yearning for their southern homeland—a yearning that reflected the feelings of many whites as well as African Americans.

As southerners moved north, the children of those immigrants that had poured into the United States over the previous fifty years were gradually being assimilated into the wider society. The first-ever jazz phonograph recording, "Livery Stable Blues," was performed by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a white ensemble led by the son of Italian immigrant Nick La Rocca. With the expansion of the entertainment industry and Tin Pan Alley, songwriters such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, Jews from New York's Lower East Side, were composing ditties portraying an idyllic America that evoked Stephen Foster's sentimentalized version of a pastoral South. Gershwin and Berlin, blues singers from Chicago, white jazz bands from New Orleans: none of these were creating folklore; they were instead helping to produce commodities for the mass market. However, they were also prompting an idea of a common folk heritage that was rooted in the pastoral. Similarly, cinema portrayals of western heroes from the previous century added to the illusion of a rural America that predated mass immigration and urbanization. So, even for the children of immigrants, a perception of an American past was constructed that was all-inclusive.

The New Deal epoch and the ascendancy of the Popular Front during the 1930s produced a celebration of the people that was reflected in the photography of Dorothea Lange, whose "Migrant Mother" signified the stabilizing effect of the family and the dignifying presence of women at a time when many men were forced to travel the length and breadth of America searching for work. Lange was employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal agency that was, between 1935 and 1943, responsible for sending folklorists, writers, and photographers out on field trips to observe the cultural mores, oral histories, education, political views, and medical needs of families in case studies that spanned twenty-four states. The work of the WPA marked a trend that had witnessed folklorists and collectors set out to explore the treasures that existed within America's cultural undergrowth.

Prompted by the anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University, Zora Neale Hurston made several exploratory journeys to the South to unearth a wealth of African American folktales, rhymes, and jokes which would find the light of day in her groundbreaking chronicle of African American folklore Mules and Men, published in 1935. For folk music, under the auspices of the Library of Congress folk song archive, John and Alan Lomax first went to the South in 1933 recording folk songs, reels, and obscure country blues by performers, some of whom had never left their locality. John Lomax was also responsible for bringing Huddie Ledbetter out of Angola State Penitentiary and to the attention of folk music. Lomax also conducted several notable interviews for the Library of Congress including Leadbelly, the now-legendary Oklahoma folk poet Woody Guthrie, and the Georgia blues singer Blind Willie McTell. To complement the Lomaxes' field recordings, the maverick avant-garde filmmaker-artist and part-time anthropologist Harry Smith uncovered dozens of vinyl recordings from between 1927 and 1932, a time when record sales plummeted. Smith's collection, which covered southern traditional music from Appalachia to Texas, found its way to Folkways Records and was eventually released as the Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952. The anthology would have a huge effect on the folk boom of the early 1960s, a time when folk music had become firmly entrenched as a vehicle for political protest.

Quite clearly the celebrating of a people's culture was a concept held dear by the political left. In 1968, the organizers for Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's March set up folklore workshops for African American, poor white, and Hispanic participants. This notion of unity through diversity was evident in folk festivals that were first staged in the 1930s, a time when institutions such as Tennessee's Highlander Folk School took sharecroppers and trained them to be union organizers. One of the tactics employed by Highlander to attract both blacks and whites into workers' collectives was the conversion of Negro spirituals and traditional folk songs into songs of solidarity. "We Shall Not Be Moved," for example, became a rallying cry on the picket line.

Seemingly, the whole political climate of the 1930s and 1940s lent itself to the reinterpretation of folk songs as propaganda. Woody Guthrie rewrote countless traditional folk songs so as to convey a political message. "John Henry" became "Tom Joad," "The Ballad of Jesse James" became "Jesus Christ," and Leadbelly's "Good Night Irene"—itself based on a traditional melody—became "Roll On Columbia." Guthrie came from a generation that was influenced by phonograph recordings. By listening to the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers as a young man, he was inheriting an oral tradition, but one which had become universalized by twentieth-century technology. The radio, in particular, furnished a network that spanned the country. The fireside chats of President Franklin D. Roosevelt epitomized the "folksy" or homespun quality that has characterized many American heads of state from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan.

The radio then, whether regional or national, engendered a spirit of community that encouraged a perception of American identity among its listeners. The fact that commercial interests became interwoven with folklore established a trend that carried on into television. From the early sponsorship of the Grand Ole Opry and the 1930s King Biscuit Flour blues broadcasts in Helena, Arkansas, to present-day television commercials advertising beer that evoke rural Mississippi and the Delta blues, the business community has promoted folk culture as an exemplar for American identity in order to sell its own product.

In spite of the view that folklore has become more of a commodity than a people's culture, there is still much to suggest that oral traditions, folktales, and songs will continue to flourish in an age of spiraling technology and global communication. The Internet and the World Wide Web now provide access to the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institute, and any number of folklore centers, all of which contain elaborate chronicles of migrant narratives, field recordings, blues songs, and transcriptions of WPA interviews. American folklore is not static and there is still an immense amount of material that remains unrecorded and underresearched. Events, disasters, and wars all produce their unwritten histories though technology has helped to preserve those histories. Who is not to say that rap music represents an extension of the African American oral tradition, or that the AIDS memorial quilt signifies a folk heritage which predates the industrial age? The revival in American "roots" music, the boom in handicraft sales, and the success of television shows like The Beverly Hillbillies are all examples of how folklore, commercial interests, and popular culture blend into one another. In this respect, folklore allows the past and the present to meet head on and interacts with popular culture and the commercial world in a way that has almost become an American tradition in itself.

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Bronner, Simon J. Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998.

Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Study of American Folklore; An Introduction. New York: Norton, 1968.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1996.

Dorson, Richard M. American Folklore. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959.

Eagleton, Terry. The Idea of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Filene, Benjamin. "'Our Singing Country': John and Alan Lomax, Leadbelly, and the Construction of the American Past." American Quarterly (December 1991): 602–624.

Grundy, Pamela. "'We Always Tried to be Good People': Respectability, Crazy Water Crystals, and Hillbilly Music on the Air, 1933–1935." Journal of American History 81, no. 4 (March 1995): 1591–1620.

Kelley, Robin D. G. "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Folk'." American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (December 1992): 1400–1408.

Levine, Lawrence W. "The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences." In Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Malone, Bill C. Country Music U.S.A. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.

Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.

—Peter Hammond

Folklore has played a vital role in the lives of the Russian people and has exerted a considerable influence on the literature, music, dance, and other arts of Russia, including such major nineteenth-and twentieth-century writers and composers as Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Tchaikovsky, and Igor Stravinsky.

A folklore tradition has existed and flourished in Russia for many centuries, has been collected and studied for well more than two hundred years, and is represented by a variety of large and small genres, including oral epic songs, folktales, laments, ritual and lyric songs, incantations, riddles, and proverbs.

A simple explanation for the survival of folklore over such a long period of time is difficult to find. Some possible reasons can be found in the fact that the population was predominately rural and unable to read and write prior to the Soviet era; that the secular, nonspiritual literature of the folklore tradition was for the most part a primary source of entertainment for Russians from all classes and levels of society; or that the Orthodox Church was unsuccessful in its efforts to repress the Russian peasant's pagan, pre-Christian folk beliefs and rituals, which over time had absorbed many Christian elements, a phenomenon commonly referred to as "double belief." The fact that the Russian peasant was both geographically and culturally far removed from urban centers and events that influenced the country's development and direction also played a role in folklore's survival. And Russia's geographical location itself was a significant factor, making possible close contact with the rich folklore traditions of neighboring peoples, including the Finns, the nomadic Turkic tribes, and the non-Russian peoples of the vast Siberian region.

Evidence of a folklore tradition appeared in Russian medieval religious and secular works of the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries, and conflicting attitudes toward its existence prior to the eighteenth century are well documented. The church considered it as evil, as the work of the devil. But memoirs and historical literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries indicate that folklore, folktales in particular, was quite favorably regarded by many. Ivan the Terrible (1533 - 1584), for example, hired blind men to tell stories at his bedside until he fell asleep. Less than one hundred years later, however, Tsar Alexis (1645 - 1676), son of Peter the Great (1696 - 1725), ordered the massacre of practitioners of this and other secular arts. Royal edict notwithstanding, tellers of tales continued to bring pleasure to people, and on the rural estates of noblemen and in high social circles of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Moscow, skillful narrators were well rewarded.

The earliest collection of Russian folklore, consisting of some songs and tales, was made during the seventeenth century by two Oxford-educated Englishmen: Richard James, chaplain to an English diplomatic mission in Moscow (1619 - 1620), and Samuel Collins, physician to Tsar Alexei (during the 1660s).

The first important collection of Russian folklore by Russians was that of folksongs from the Ural region, made during the middle of the eighteenth century and published early during the nineteenth century. At about the same time a real foundation was laid for folklore research and scholarship in Russia, due largely to the influence of Western romanticism and widespread increase in national self-awareness. This movement, represented in particular by German romantic philosophers and folklorists such as Johann Herder (1744 - 1803) and the brothers Grimm (Jacob, 1785 - 1863; Wilhelm, 1786 - 1859), was mirrored in Russia during the early years of the nineteenth century among the Slavophiles, a group of Russian intellectuals of the 1830s, who believed in Russia's spiritual greatness and who showed an intense interest in Russia's folklore, folk customs, and the role of the folk in the development of Russian culture. Folklore now began to be seriously collected, and among the significant works published were large collections of Russian proverbs by V. I. Dal (1801-1872) and Russian folktales by A. N. Afanasev (1826-1871).

But the latter part of the nineteenth century signaled the most significant event in Russian folklore scholarship, when P.N. Rybnikov (1831 - 1885) and A.F. Hilferding (Gilferding, 1831 - 1872) uncovered a treasury of folklore in the Lake Onega region of northwestern Russia during the 1860s and 1870s, including a flourishing tradition of oral epic songs, which up to that time was believed to be almost extinct as a living folklore form. This discovery led to a systematic search for folklore that is still being conducted during the early twenty-first century.

During the Soviet period folklore was criticized for depicting the reality of the past and was even considered harmful to the people. Until the death of Stalin in 1953 folklore scholarship was under constant Party supervision and limited in scope, focusing on social problems and ideological matters. But folklore itself was recognized as a powerful means to promote patriotism and advance Communist ideas and ideals, and it became a potent instrument in the formation of Socialist culture. New Soviet versions of folklore were created and made public through a variety of media - concert hall, radio, film, television, and tapes and phonograph records. These new works included contemporary subject matter: for example, an airplane instead of the wooden eagle on whose back the hero often traveled, a rifle for slaying a modern dragon in military uniform, or marriage to the daughter of a factory manager rather than a princess.

Since the 1970s, Russian folklore has become free from government control, and the sphere of study has expanded. During the early twenty-first century, folklore of the far-flung regions of the former Soviet Union is being collected in the field. Many of the older, classic collections of Russian folklore are being republished, old cylinder recordings restored, and bibliographies published, mainly under the direction of the Folklore Committee of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in St. Petersburg and the Folklore Section of the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow.

Among the most important narrative folklore genres are Russian oral epic songs and folktales, which provide a rich diversity of thematic and story material. The oral epic songs are the major genre in verse. Many of them concern the adventures of heroes associated with Prince Vladimir's court in Kiev in southern Russia; the action in a second group of epic songs occurs on the "open plain," where Russians fight the Tatar invaders; and the events of a third group of songs take place near the medieval city of Novgorod in northern Russia. The stories are made up of themes of feasting, journeys, and combats; acts of insubordination and punishment; trials of skill in arms, sports, and horsemanship; and themes of courtship, marriage, infidelity, and reconciliation. Some popular songs are about the giant Svyatogor, the Old Cossack Ilya Muromets, the dragon-slayer Dobrynya Nikitich, Alyosha Popovich the priest's son, and the rich merchant Sadko.

The leading genre in prose, one that is well known beyond Russia, is the folktale, which includes tales of various kinds, such as animal and moral tales, as well as magic or so-called fairy tales, similar to the Western European fairy tales. Russian magic or fairy tales often tell a story about a hero who leaves home for some reason, must carry out one or several different tasks, encounters many obstacles along the way, accomplishes all of the tasks, and gains wealth or a fair maiden in the end. Among the popular heroes and villains of Russian folktales are Ivan the King's son, the witch Baba Yaga, Ivan the fool, the immortal Kashchey, Grandfather Frost, and the Firebird.

Bibliography

Afanasev, Alexander. (1975). Russian Fairy Tales. New York: Random House.

Bailey, James, and Ivanova, Tatyana. (1998). Russian Folk Epics. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Ivanits, Linda J. (1989). Russian Folk Beliefs. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Miller, Frank J. (1990). Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era. Armonk, NY:M.E. Sharpe.

Oinas, Felix J. (1985). Essays on Russian Folklore and Mythology. Columbus, OH: Slavica.

Oinas, Felix J., and Soudakoff, Stephen, eds. (1975). The Study of Russian Folklore. The Hague: Mouton.

Sokolov, Y.M. (1971). Russian Folklore, tr. Catherine Ruth Smith. Detroit, MI: Folklore Associates.

—PATRICIA ARANT

Traditional stories and legends, transmitted orally (rather than in writing) from generation to generation. The stories of Paul Bunyan are examples of American folklore.

Dansk (Danish)
n. - folklore, folkeminder

Nederlands (Dutch)
folklore

Français (French)
n. - folklore

Deutsch (German)
n. - Folklore

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - παραδοσιακά έθιμα και δοξασίες, λαϊκή παράδοση, φολκλόρ, λαογραφία

Italiano (Italian)
folclore

Português (Portuguese)
n. - folclore (m)

Русский (Russian)
фольклор

Español (Spanish)
n. - folklore

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - folklore

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
民俗学, 民间传说, 民间风俗

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 民俗學, 民間傳說, 民間風俗

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 민속, 민요, 민간 전설

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 民間伝承, 民俗学

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الفولكلور : عادات الشعب وتقاليده‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮סיפורי עם, ידע-עם, פולקלור‬

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