Folklore is the body of expressive culture, including tales, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs, and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions (including oral traditions) of that culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The academic and usually ethnographic study of folklore is sometimes called folkloristics. The word 'folklore' was first used by the English antiquarian William Thoms in a letter published by the London Journal Athenaeum in 1846. In usage, there is a continuum between folklore and mythology. Stith Thompson made a major attempt to index the motifs of both folklore and mythology, providing at outline into which new motifs can be placed, and scholars can keep track of all older motifs.

History

Part 1: Nineteenth Century Backgrounds W.K. McNeil, Pre-Society American Folklorists Simon J. Bronner, The Intellectual Climate of Nineteenth-Century American Folklore Studies Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, On the Founding of the American Folklore Society and the Journal of American Folklore

The concept of folklore developed as part of the 19th century ideology of romantic nationalism, leading to the reshaping of oral traditions to serve modern ideological goals; only in the 20th century did ethnographers begin to attempt to record folklore without overt political goals. The Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm, collected orally transmitted German tales and published the first series as Kinder- und Hausmärchen ("Children's and Household Tales") in 1812.

The term was coined in 1846 by an Englishman, William Thoms, who wanted to use an Anglo-Saxon term for what was then called "popular antiquities." Johann Gottfried von Herder first advocated the deliberate recording and preservation of folklore to document the authentic spirit, tradition, and identity of the German people; the belief that there can be such authenticity is one of the tenets of the romantic nationalism which Herder developed. One definition is "artistic communication in small groups," coined by Dan Ben-Amos a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and the term, and the associated field of study, now include non-verbal art forms and customary practices.

Nature

Folklore, in nature, is traditional. All the traditional approaches of people including customs, beliefs, behavioral, drama, dances, art, painting, sculpture of past times of a particular area are the subject matter of the ‘Folklore'.

‘Folklore' is that which is orally transmitted. In the non-literate society where the cultural base requires an oral tradition for propagation, it happens so that the folklorists or anthropologists tend to use folklore to determine their language, the system of their hunting, the sense of right and wrong and so on as it prevailed amongst them, all of these being traditional and transmitted orally. On the other hand, in the literate society, there exists many learnings which are basically oral not written. As for example, one learns how to drive, to plough or to plant, in what manner one has to brush his teeth etc. not in written form. If we imitate these ideas, we would have to accept these learnings, both literate and non-literate societies, as folklore since the both are traditionally oral.