Knowra Folklore Folklore Folklore comprises a community’s traditional beliefs, customs, narratives, and expressive practices, transmitted and adapted across generations through performance, participation, and everyday life.
Oral tradition : Cultural knowledge and expression passed between people primarily through speech and performance. Spoken transmission carries many tales, songs, sayings, and customs.
Cultural transmission : The passage of learned practices, knowledge, and values between people and generations. It explains how folklore moves through families, communities, and social networks.
Brothers Grimm : Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were German scholars whose collections helped establish the study and publication of folk narratives. Their fairy-tale collections shaped both folklore scholarship and popular ideas about tradition.
Ethnography : A research approach that describes social life through sustained engagement and observation in a community. Ethnographic methods document folklore in the settings where people use it.
Popular culture : Widely consumed cultural products and practices shaped by mass media, markets, and public participation. Folklore can circulate within popular culture, but is not defined by mass production.
Folktale : A traditional narrative, usually transmitted orally and reshaped through repeated telling. Folktales are one of folklore’s most widely shared narrative forms.
Memorate : A first-person account of an experience interpreted as supernatural or extraordinary. Personal supernatural accounts can become shared traditional narratives.
William Thoms : An English antiquarian who introduced the word “folklore” in an 1846 letter to The Athenaeum. Thoms named the field by proposing a term for traditional popular knowledge.
Urban legend : A contemporary story circulated as true, often involving a striking or unsettling event. Urban legends show how folklore circulates in modern settings and media.
Literature : Written or spoken artistic works, especially those valued for imaginative or expressive qualities. Folklore often circulates through performance and collective adaptation rather than fixed authorship.
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