Folk tradition is also called legend, it is a short, usually prose narrative, which starts from real incidents or phenomena and gives them a supernatural, a mythical explanation, but presents it as truth. Thus a rock with a strange shape gives rise to a story of the ship that marbled with the proud fairy, and the incredible story of a girl being chased by the corsairs is explained by the miraculous intervention of a saint.
Tradition differs from the fairy tale both in form and more so in content.
In form the man that tells fairy tales tries to set up a work with a dramatic plot and characters and embellish it with dialogue, description, repetition and all kinds of ornaments of speech. In tradition the narrator will tell us what he has to say in the simplest way, here we will not find descriptions or dialogues beyond what is necessary, the narration is specific and dense, very close to everyday speech.
In content, the fairy tale often comes from elements lost in the early times of man’s life on earth, which is why we find fairy tales common to peoples who are nowadays distant, because they start from similar living conditions. Set in a time and place completely imaginary (once upon a time, in a small kingdom). In tradition, the imaginary element is usually set in a specific place (a town, a certain neighborhood, a certain castle, a certain mountainside). And the time in the tradition may be left undefined, but it is usually specified. Often the narrator validates the truth of his narrative with personal references such as “in my grandmother’s time”, sometimes the narrator, with humor, relieves himself of the responsibility of truth.
In general, tradition, although it has elements of the old, is closely linked to the people who gave birth to it and to their geographical area. Its themes extend all around the world, from the depths of the earth to the sky and from the depths of history to the present day. In this area, behind the dry reality of books and everyday life, another life emerges, with its variety of imaginary forms, with its own laws and its own truth.
Here the creatures lose their physical properties that we know “the Sun is a new bloodsucker and the moon is a complaining girl”. Whatever surprises the people, whatever they cannot understand, whatever arouses their admiration or awe, and he tries to explain, even if his interpretation does not agree with his experiences in the sensible world. The old castles built by the ancient Greeks, by supernatural men, the beauty of Hagia Sophia, whose design could only be given by God, the incredible end of Constantinople, accompanied by a multitude of divine signs, the whispers of the night, the magic of the starry sky, the sudden illnesses brought by the fairies, the wailing of the storm, where the sailor hears the mermaid crying for Alexander the Great.
Such interpretations are, we might say, pre-scientific, and usually anthropomorphic, giving life and a familiar human form to the mysterious world that surrounds us. Sometimes, we said, they come to us from very old times, from the primitive memory of man, who was closer to plants, to animals, an element of nature. Sometimes we start from historical memories, perhaps transmitted from the lips of teachers, which are assimilated and colored and become legends in popular memory.
Today, in almost all peoples, people know and admit the interpretations that science has given and gives for natural and human phenomena. But the world of traditions has not lost its charm, for it is a monument to the speech and thought of other ages, and perhaps also because the mystery which phenomena present to man has never been entirely dispelled, from heaven to earth, and as in our hearts, from the depths of the past to the wondering glance we cast into the unknown future, there is always a place for the absurd and the dream.
In order to study the traditions better, scientists have asked to classify them into genres, mainly according to their themes. There were detailed classifications, such as, old stories, The City and Hagia Sophia, Sunken Places and States, Marbles, The Sky, Stars and Earth, Fairies and others.
But essentially we can divide the traditions into four major categories
1 Mythological
2 Causal
3 Historical
4 Religious
A tradition can belong to more than one genre, such as the “foot of the Virgin Mary”, where a dent in the rock is explained by the foot step of the Virgin Mary.
From the book “HELLENIC LACICAL CULTURE” published by ΓΝΩΣΗ
words from tradition
