Folk Lore
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the lore of the common people. It includes traditions, customs, fairy tales , ballads, songs, accounts of ancient festivals, games, local superstitions and beliefs, weather proverbs, popular sayings and nicknames, nursery rhymes, riddles, and jingles of every sort. Interest in this branch of inquiry, and even the word itself, are of recent origin. The impcrtance of folk lore as a means of studying social history, of tracing relationships between races, and investigating the origin of religious beliefs was not realized until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Many of the topics included under the subject may seem trivial to the student of weightier themes; but they are none the less fascinating. Poetry and fable were the topics that first attracted attention. Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, The Children's Tales of the brothers Grimm of Germany, Hans Christian Andersen's Stories and Fables, and the Mother Goose rhymes and nursery tales are collections of this sort. The first important steps in the study of folk lore were taken in Germany. The Folk Lore Society of England, which remains the most important organization of the kind, was established in 1878. The association considers that it has begun its work all too late. The advent of the railway and the newspaper has broken up the hearthstone and village circles where traditions were handed down from generation to generation. It is feared that many an interesting story and bit of superstition has been lost beyond recover. An elderly person whose mind is stored with local traditions is a treasure-trove to the student of folk lore. If we imagine a grandparent of seventy-five telling stories to a child of five, we may see readily that two such tellings carry the student back two hundred years. The American Folk Lore Society was organized at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1888. Its official publication, The Folk Lore Journal, aims to collect information relative to the traditions and tales brought to this country by English, French, and other early settlers; the superstitions, tales, and dialects of the negroes, and the legends of the North American Indians. It may be said in passing that Longfellow's Hiawatha is founded on the folk lore of the Ojibways. Longfellow had much of his material from an Ojibway chieftain who was visiting in Boston.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 fear that railways and newspapers had killed the traditions off proved wrong: folklorists now treat folklore as something continuously made rather than a residue to be rescued, studying office jokes, urban legends, protest chants and internet memes alongside ballads and nursery rhymes. The salvage model gave way after the mid-twentieth century to performance-centred study of how a tale is told and by whom, and the field acquired its own name, folkloristics, with degree programmes at universities such as Indiana. Institutionally the account still holds up — the Folklore Society (1878) and the American Folklore Society (1888) both survive, the latter still issuing the Journal of American Folklore — and UNESCO's 2003 convention on intangible cultural heritage put the safeguarding of living tradition on a formal international footing. One point modern readers flag: Longfellow's Hiawatha borrows an Iroquois statesman's name for stories of the Ojibwe trickster Nanabozho, a conflation the 1910 note passes over.
Written for this edition, 2026.