The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives

THIS ARTICLE1 is directed toward a definition of myth, legend, and folktale. These three very basic terms in folklore are loosely used and have sometimes been as hotly disputed as the nature of folklore itself. Definitions and classifications are neither particularly interesting nor necessarily fruitful, but if any field of study needs clarification of its basic terminology it is clearly folklore, which has so long been plagued by inconsistent and contradictory definitions. This article will contribute nothing, however, if it does not lead to some agreement among folklorists on these terms, whatever definitions may ultimately be accepted. I make no claim to originality in the definitions proposed here. On the contrary, one of the main arguments in support of them is that they conform to what students of the folklore of both nonliterate and European societies have found, as will be shown. I have found them meaningful in some twenty years of teaching and they seem so obvious and self-evident that I can only wonder at the disagreements which have arisen. Less conventional, but certainly not without precedent, is the proposal that these three important forms of folklore be considered as sub-types of a broader form class, the prose narrative. This provides a system of classification in which they constitute a single category, defined in terms of form alone, comparable to the form classes of proverbs, riddles, and other genres of verbal art.2 Prose narrative, I propose, is an appropriate term for the widespread and important category of verbal which includes myths, legends, and folktales. These three forms are related to each other in that they are narratives in prose, and this fact distinguishes them from proverbs, riddles, ballads, poems, tongue-twisters, and other forms of verbal on the basis of strictly formal characteristics. Prose narrative is clearly less equivocal for this broad category than because the latter has so often been used by folklorists to mean Mdrchen. Its adoption permits us to equate the English term folktale with the German term Mdrchen, as I do here, and thus to dispense with the latter. Many American folklorists, to be sure, employ the term Mdrchen in English because they use to include all of these three sub-types, but this is unnecessary, since prose narrative better serves this purpose. When the term prose narrative proves clumsy or inept, I suggest that be used as a synonym; this is admittedly more ambiguous, but one can appropriately speak of myths, legends, and folktales as tales, and its counterpart in German, Erzdhlung, is similarly used. I cannot recall how long I have been using the term prose narrative in my folklore course; but when or by whom it was introduced is of less significance than the recent trend towards its acceptance. Boggs used prose narrative to include myth, legend, and tale in his article on folklore classification (I949),3 it has also been used in this sense by Davenport in discussing Marshallese folklore (I953), and by Berry in discussing West African spoken art (I96I). Folklore as Prose Narrative is the title of the second chapter of the Clarkes' recent text book (I963) . One may also cite the Herskovitses'