Unless your species evolved sometime after 1993 when Jurassic Park hit theaters, you're no doubt familiar with this dinosaur-bites-man disaster tale set on an island.Britannica. com. Myth has existed in every society. Indeed, it would seem to be a basic constituent of human culture. Because the variety is so great, it is difficult to generalize about the nature of myths. But it is clear that in their general characteristics and in their details a people’s myths reflect, express, and explore the people’s self- image. The study of myth is thus of central importance in the study both of individual societies and of human culture as a whole. Relation of myths to other narrative forms. In Western culture there are a number of literary or narrative genres that scholars have related in different ways to myths. Examples are fables, fairy tales, folktales, sagas, epics, legends, and etiologic tales (which refer to causes or explain why a thing is the way it is). ![]() Another form of tale, the parable, differs from myth in its purpose and character. Even in the West, however, there is no agreed definition of any of these genres, and some scholars question whether multiplying categories of narrative is helpful at all, as opposed to working with a very general concept such as the traditional tale. Non- Western cultures apply classifications that are different both from the Western categories and from one another. Most, however, make a basic distinction between “true” and “fictitious” narratives, with “true” ones corresponding to what in the West would be called myths. If it is accepted that the category of traditional tale should be subdivided, one way of doing so is to regard the various subdivisions as comparable to bands of colour in a spectrum. ![]() [Physics FAQ] - Various small updates over the years. Updated 1994–1997 by SIC, PEG. Original by Vijay Fafat. A Physics Book List: Recommendations from the Net. Also by John & Jana: HAPPY PUNKS 1 2 3: A COUNTING BOOK by John & Jana, 32 pages, ISBN 978-1-933149-67-7, $15.95, 8 x 10, Hardcover, Full color. 1Q84 Haruki Murakami $19.99 "The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Within this figurative spectrum, there will be similarities and analogies between myth and folktale or between myth and legend or between fairy tale and folktale. In the section that follows, it is assumed that useful distinctions can be drawn between different categories. It should, however, be remembered throughout that these classifications are far from rigid and that, in many cases, a given tale might be plausibly assigned to more than one category. Fables. Test Your Knowledge. Journey Around the World. The word fable derives from the Latin word fabula, which originally meant about the same as the Greek mythos. Like mythos, it came to mean a fictitious or untrue story. Myths, in contrast, are not presented as fictitious or untrue. Fables, like some myths, feature personified animals or natural objects as characters. Unlike myths, however, fables almost always end with an explicit moral message, and this highlights the characteristic feature of fables—namely, that they are instructive tales that teach morals about human social behaviour. Myths, by contrast, tend to lack this directly didactic aspect, and the sacred narratives that they embody are often hard to translate into direct prescriptions for action in everyday human terms. Another difference between fables and myths relates to a feature of the narratives that they present. The context of a typical fable will be unspecific as to time and space—e. A fox and a goose met at a pool.” A typical myth, on the other hand, will be likely to identify by name the god or hero concerned in a given exploit and to specify details of geography and genealogy—e. Oedipus was the son of Laius, the king of Thebes.”Fairy tales. Britannica Lists & Quizzes. The term fairy tale, if taken literally, should refer only to stories about fairies, a class of supernatural and sometimes malevolent beings—often believed to be of diminutive size—who were thought by people in medieval and postmedieval Europe to inhabit a kingdom of their own; a literary expression of this belief can be found in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The term fairy tale, however, is normally used to refer to a much wider class of narrative, namely stories (directed above all at an audience of children) about an individual, almost always young, who confronts strange or magical events; examples are “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Cinderella,” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The modern concept of the fairy tale seems not to be found earlier than the 1. Europe, but the narratives themselves have earlier analogues much farther afield, notably in the Indian Katha- saritsagara (The Ocean of Story) and in The Thousand and One Nights. Like myths, fairy tales present extraordinary beings and events. Unlike myths—but like fables—fairy tales tend to be placed in a setting that is geographically and temporally vague and might begin with the words “Once upon a time there was a handsome prince….” A myth about a prince, by contrast, would be likely to name him and to specify his lineage, since such details might be of collective importance (for example, with reference to issues of property inheritance or the relative status of different families) to the social group among which the myth was told. Folktales. There is much disagreement among scholars as to how to define the folktale; consequently, there is disagreement about the relation between folktale and myth. One view of the problem is that of the American folklorist Stith Thompson, who regarded myths as one type of folktale; according to this approach, the particular characteristic of myth is that its narratives deal with sacred events that happened “in the beginning.” Other scholars either consider folktale a subdivision of myth or regard the two categories as distinct but overlapping. The latter view is taken by the British Classicist Geoffrey S. Kirk, who in Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (1. Examples of folktale motifs are encounters between ordinary, often humble, human beings and supernatural adversaries such as witches, giants, or ogres; contests to win a bride; and attempts to overcome a wicked stepmother or jealous sisters. But these typical folktale themes occur also in stories normally classified as myths, and there must always be a strong element of arbitrariness in assigning a motif to a particular category. A different and important aspect of the problem of defining a folktale relates to the historical origin of the concept. As with the notion of folklore, the notion of folktale has its roots in the late 1. From that period until the middle of the 1. European thinkers of a nationalist persuasion argued that stories told by ordinary people constituted a continuous tradition reaching back into the nation’s past. Thus, stories such as the Märchen (“tales”) collected by the Grimm brothers in Germany are folktales because they were told by the people rather than by an aristocratic elite. This definition of folktale introduces a new criterion for distinguishing between myth and folktale—namely, what class of person tells the story—but it by no means removes all the problems of classification. Just as the distinction between folk and aristocracy cannot be transferred from medieval Europe to tribal Africa or Classical Greece without risk of distortion, so the importing of a distinction between myth and folktale on the later European model is extremely problematic. Sagas and epics. The word saga is often used in a generalized and loose way to refer to any extended narrative re- creation of historical events. A distinction is thus sometimes drawn between myths (set in a semidivine world) and sagas (more realistic and more firmly grounded in a specific historical setting). This rather vague use of saga is best avoided, however, since the word can more usefully retain the precise connotation of its original context. The word saga is Old Norse and means “what is said.” The sagas are a group of medieval Icelandic prose narratives; the principal sagas date from the 1.Icelandic heroes who lived during the 1. . If the word saga is restricted to this Icelandic context, at least one of the possible terminological confusions over words for traditional tales is avoided.While saga in its original sense is a narrative type confined to a particular time and place, epics are found worldwide. Examples can be found in the ancient world (the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer), in medieval Europe (the Nibelungenlied), and in modern times (the Serbo- Croatian epic poetry recorded in the 1. Among the many non- European examples are the Indian Mahabharata and the Tibetan Gesar epic. Epic is similar to saga in that both narrative forms look back to an age of heroic endeavour, but it differs from saga in that epics are almost always composed in poetry (with a few exceptions such as Kazak epic and the Turkish Book of Dede Korkut).
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