"The legends of old times, the deeds of bygone days ..." Every Russian-speaking person has heard, seen, read these lines since childhood. So began his work "Ruslan and Lyudmila" Alexander Pushkin. Are the legends of his fairy tale really? To know exactly, you need to understand the concepts.
Poetry, poetry, fairy tales, but what does the word "tradition" mean? The definition and special features of this phenomenon we will consider in our article.
Tradition as a genre
We will begin our acquaintance with the world of folk traditions by defining the concept itself. So, various sources give us the following.
Tradition is a prosaic folklore genre, the plot of which is historical facts in a folk interpretation. Traditions of the people are not connected with the genre of a fairy tale, although sometimes the events resemble mythical or fabulous.
Legends in the theory of literature are usually divided into two large groups according to the type of plot: historical and toponymic.
Traditions - part of oral folk prose
We learned what tradition is. The definition gave us a general idea. Let's talk about one feature of this genre. It is noteworthy that the traditions are a genre of oral folk art. This means that the stories heard today were created hundreds of years ago and passed from mouth to mouth. By the time the legend was recorded on an information medium, tens or even hundreds of transformations of the plot and images could have occurred.
The works of the famous Greek poet Homer "Iliad" and "Odyssey", which have an incredible size, were also transmitted orally. They also described historical events, embellished and somewhat modified. This shows some similarities between these creations and newer traditions.
As a genre of oral prose, tradition delights in its long history. Fortunately, or maybe not, in our time their distribution in recorded form is much simpler. We should appreciate every word, tradition, which gives important spiritual knowledge about the ancestors.
Comparison with other folklore prose genres
Traditions can sometimes be mistakenly defined as a legend or an epic. To avoid this, let us call this pattern: stories of legends are aimed at explaining the origin of a cultural or natural phenomenon. They often give a certain moral assessment of the events described. And the legend is a retelling of the story of the people with the participation of heroes widely known or famous in the local area.
Traditions of the people differ from epics by their content, characters (historical figures: robbers, rulers, ordinary people, artisans), the participation of real personalities known in a certain area, who became mythological heroes.
Characteristic for this genre of folklore prose is a third-person narration of events related to the past. The storyteller was not an eyewitness to the events, but transmits a story heard from third parties.
Historical traditions
Collective folk memory created ancient legends from real facts about which we can read in somewhat different light in history textbooks. So historical legends were created.
Historical legends include Joan of Arc, Tsar Ivan the Terrible, Ataman Mazepa and others.
Here we also include biblical stories about the creation of the world, the Israelites leaving Egypt in search of their land, and many others.
This group includes such traditions that absorb people's ideas about the creation of their world. All folklore units create a single historical and mythological world that displays a broad picture of the people's view of the surrounding reality.
The time frame covered by the legends is difficult to determine: this is information from the biblical antiquity to the present.
Toponymic Traditions
Toponymic traditions are those that record events that have become the basis for the origin of a name. Local heroes and events, relevant only there, become their heroes, respectively. Studying such local stories is an interesting part of toponymic and ethnographic research.
Toponymic are short legends about the Serpent Shafts (from the Serpent), the city of Kiev (about Kiev, his brothers and sister), the city of Orsha (Prince Orsh and his daughter Orshitsa), the city of Lviv and many other toponymic objects.
Prospects for Researchers
In every city, every village there are such short stories about where some local name came from. Collections of such legends can be compiled endlessly. There is a field for research today. Therefore, everyone who discovered traditions and found them an interesting object of activity has a job.
To publish a collection of legends collected in a particular locality is a very real prospect. New names appear today, right at that moment. Also in remote corners of Russia there are such settlements in which folklore is actively developing. This means that new boundaries for ethnographic and folklore work appear.
It is noteworthy that at the present time there are more topographical traditions. Historical ones are preserved from previous eras, since from some time all facts are fixed immediately after they appear.
Traditions, myths and their historical basis
Tradition, the definition of which we have already given, is sometimes associated with mythology. So, stories about the exploits of the Greek hero Hercules, according to researchers, could not have arisen without real historical facts. Those mythical events and heroes, with which the probable real history of the adventures of Hercules has grown, have appeared over time.
Some facts from the Book of Enoch, in which the giants were mentioned, were confirmed. In the same way, architectural monuments were found that could be witnesses of the events that became the basis of the legend about the Flood.
conclusions
Thus, we learned that tradition is a folk-tale narrative about historical events. In the process of transmission, it is common for carriers to embellish tradition. The definition and features of this folklore genre are now known to us. We can easily distinguish it from legends and fairy tales.
Ancient traditions are a reflection of the deepest layers of culture and history of a certain people. By studying and comparing them with the facts of the history of various nations, we can draw conclusions about the worldview of the people who lived at that time. The value of retelling for ethnology is also extremely high.
Folk legends, historical and toponymic, were heard by every person, but could not pay attention to this diamond, faceted over the years of word of mouth transmission. Now we can appreciate what we know and what we hear about the surrounding cultural world. Let our article be useful to you and provide an opportunity to look at the creativity of the people from a different perspective.