Urgent!!! Can someone please answer these questions? thank you!

Question

What is Folklore? What is the function of folklore?

Answer 1

Here's a non-technical definition:

Folklore is a set of traditional (culturally specific) stories people tell one another from generation to generation. Folklore is the way important information gets stored and shared within a group. A lot of folklore involves survival skills -- both "how to get along without making enemies" and "how to stay alive."

For example - think about the 3 little pigs. Because the first two pigs were lazy and didn't want to waste time building a sturdy house, the big bad wolf ate them. The survivor put a lot of time and effort into his cozy brick-and-mortar house. The moral of the story: take your time and do your very best work (or you'll get eaten). This is the kind of story you might tell a 3rd grader getting frustrated with homework and throwing a pencil across the room. Or a teenager who wanted to cut corners building an Ikea bed.

Or, the story of the grasshopper and the ants. The grasshopper goofed off in the summer because there was food everywhere -- while the ants worked hard to collect and preserve food for the same reason. When winter came, who starved? Lesson: think ahead, prepare when you can, and don't slack off in times of abundance.

For a really great discussion about folklore as survival skills, see author Lynne Kelly's The Memory Code.