The unwritten literature (stories and proverbs and riddles and songs) of a culture.
The oral traditions and culture of a people, expressed in legends, riddles, songs, tales, and proverbs. The term was coined 1846 by W J Thoms (1803–1885), but the founder of the systematic study of the subject was Jacob Grimm; see also oral literature.
The approach to folklore has varied greatly: the German scholar Max Müller (1823–1900) interpreted it as evidence of nature myths; James Frazer was the exponent of the comparative study of early and popular folklore as mutually explanatory; Laurence Gomme (1853–1916) adopted a historical analysis; and Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) examined the material as an integral element of a given living culture. Folklore overlaps with cultural anthropology but their roots and theoretical concerns are not the same. + prikaži više