As we have studied traditional literature last year, one thing piqued my attention. Folklore became interesting to me because of how it was preserved and how it still exists today. Little did we know, as a child reader, we often encountered (and also enjoyed) reading folklores. But with the rapid changes in Literature, folklore adapts to it; thus, we can observe how folklore can be used as a premise in an all-time favourite fantasy or even in horror stories and films.
Folklore?
In Literature, a folklore refers to the traditional beliefs and stories of a community. A folklore has a similarity with a folktale in terms of being the stories which grew up from the imaginations and lives of people (folks).
A folklore centres on the stories of a specific community alone. However, the folktales are the ones which are being passed down through generations by oral tradition of storytelling. Thus, a folklore encompasses folktales, myths, legends and superstition. Hence, this became a category of traditional literature because it deals with the most ancient stories and invaluable literary heritage.
How Folklore is Used in Writing?
In the Philippines, if you are an avid fan of horror films such as Shake, Rattle and Roll, Pagpag, and Sukob, you an observe that their premise revolves around incorporating superstitions. For instance, the movie of Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla, Pagpag, uses a lot of superstitions in death or in visiting a funeral wake. The story centralised on some characters breaking the superstitions and leading them to death. On the other hand, Sukob movie, which stars Kris Aquino and Claudine Barretto, is about superstitions in marriage.
As we can observed, this usage of superstitions to develop a horror story for the said films is an actual application of folklore in writing. Therefore, incorporating folklore in writing means a writer is researching a well-preserved community story (in the case of our examples, these are superstitions) and trying to embed some elements of the genre they are working to produce a story with a folklore. In our examples, the writer of the mentioned movies experimented on ideas to produce horror movies which may have a relevancy to the Philippine culture because of the usage of some well-known superstitions.
Why Folklore?
What is actually interesting with folklores is its universality. No theory can explain how this phenomenon emerges but if we can observe, some folklores we have is somewhat similar to others. However, the bottom line here would be every single community around the world has their own stories to tell and have been preserved for many years.
But as I have mentioned, there are some changes in Literature resorting to some writers to produce stories out of their experiments with ideas and stories of the past. This is where using a folklore will be beneficial.
For instance, there is a lot of versions of Cinderella around the world. This happens because of the people localising the story to match with their culture. With this, we can see how folklores can be universal and can be owned by a particular community.
Overall, a writer who will integrate a folklore must either be a good researcher or a good listener. Remember that a folklore is a part of the traditional literature, and traditional literature first emerged with unknown people or groups of people telling stories through their mouth and letting the ears of their audience engage to it.
To successfully use folklore in your writing, regardless of the genre, you must be either an expert in your local stories or an explorer of community stories from different areas. Sometimes, the fresh ideas came from the oldest stories.
LISTEN!
Quiet your faces; be crossed every thumb;
Fix on me your eyes. . .
And out of my mind a story shall come—
Old, and lovely, and wise.
—Walter de La Mare (1930)
Tags: writing with folklore, incorporating folktales, importance of folklore in literature, folklore in writing, using folktales in writing, lifethinkler
Author: Christian Loid Valenzuela
