Quotes About Folklore

I listen to a lot of medieval music.

I think Scotland has some great stories.

I'm working on a very long series of paintings based on desert folklore.

Phil Rickman

It is as if there is another world just waiting to be discovered if only we can learn to see in a new way. Up until the seventeenth century most people in England took little notice of the prehistoric monuments that littered the land. Viewing them as a nuisance, they often dismantled them to clear fields or to provide building materials. Even so, folklore and stories lingered around many of them

Only in imaginary experience (in the folk tale, for example), which neutralizes the sense of social realities, does the social world take the form of a universe of possibles equally possible for any possible subject.

We may be living in a modern world but people still believe in 'Icchadhari Nagins' and still visit temples to rid themselves of 'sarp dosh.'

I'm a great lover of ballads.

Ive always loved the tradition of murder ballads.

The story of wolf killing illustrates the tenacity of two Euro-American conquering devices—folklore and property. Folklore fueled wolf hatred through rituals and legends codified into motifs and transmitted by word of mouth. Wolf lore survived by being remembered and retold, while property in the form of livestock also traveled across landscapes and lifetimes.

To overpower savagery one must lash out savagely. In their stories Euro-American colonists invented and broadcast a vision of wolves as threats to human safety. They then modeled their behavior on the ferocity they perceived in wolves. Thus folklore explains not only why humans destroyed wolves but why they did so with such cruel enthusiasm.

Gli abitanti del villaggio diventarono incarnazioni di quella leggenda che avevano ascoltato tante volte.

There is nothing more characteristic of a country than its imaginations. - Prologue to The Tiger Guest, P'u Sung-ling

Myth is what we call other people's religion.

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares, of the world; and his characteristics are essentially everywhere the same. He is the hoarder of the general benefit.

If a being from another world were to ask you, How can I learn what it's like to be human? a good answer would be, Study mythology.

Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood.

Legends are always better from afar.

Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.

And this, they say, is how thirteen became the "baker's dozen"—a custom common for over a century, and alive in some places to this day.

The Pugachev rebellion,' the historian Nicholas Riasanovsky has noted, 'served to point out again, forcefully and tragically, the chasm between French philosophy and Russian reality.' The Pugachev rebellion has become enshrined in Russian history and folklore, revered by many peasants and radicals and deplored by the rest of society.

No frogs can sing as well as Polish ones.