1. All right, so now we’ve talked about folk legends and seen that their, one of their key features is there’s usually some real history behind them, they are often about real people, so you can identify with the characters, and that’s what engages us in them. The particular stories might not be true and some of the characters or events might be made up, but there’s still a sense that the story could have been true since it is about a real person.
2. Folk tales are imaginative stories that like folk legends, they have been passed down orally, from storyteller to storyteller for since ancient times, but with folk tales you don’t ever really get the sense that the story might have been true, they are purely imaginative and so quite revealing, I think anyway, about the culture and the connection between folk tales and culture, which we’ll talk about.
3. But first let’s go over the various types of folk tale and focus specifically on Norwegian folk tales since they illustrate the variety pretty well, there are in general three main types of Norwegian folk tales. One is animal stories, where animals are the main characters, they can be wild animals or domestic, and a lot of times they can talk and behave like humans, but at the same time, they retain their animal characteristics too, they tend to involve animals like bears, wolves and foxes.
4. The point of these stories, their internal objectives, so the speak, is usually to explain some feature of the animal, how it arose, so there’s one about a fox who fools a bear into going ice fishing with his tail, when the bear puts his tail into the water through a hole in the ice, to try and catch a fish, the ice freezes around it, and he ends up pulling his tail off, so that’s why bears to this day have such short tails.
5. The third main kind of folk tale is the comical story, we’ll say more later about these, but for now, just be aware of the category and that they can contain supernatural aspects, but they are usually more playful and amusing overall than supernatural stories. Now, as I said, traditionally, folk tales were just passed down orally, each generation of storytellers had their own style of telling a story.
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