Goats, Trolls, & Numbskulls A Middle School Lecture on Folklore Genres with Lise Lunge-Larsen Sample Preparation and ASL Interpretations by Doug Bowen-Bailey License Info | Table of Contents | Overview | Your Assignment | Preparation | English Lectures | Sample Interpretations | Transcripts of English Lectures | Interpreter Notes | Building Involvement in ASL | Credits

Transcript of Introduction

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So, um, a lot of you probably know I'm a storyteller, and now actually, also, well actually, I have my degree in applied linguistics. But I did my degree, advanced degree in using storytelling to teach English to speakers of other languages. And I have studied folklore at the University of Oslo and I studied it also at the University of Minnesota. So this is something I know a lot about. It's kind of almost hard for me to narrow it down, something that you could get a PhD in if you want to, to get you interested and thinking about it for one hour.

When I say the word folklore, folk tales, what are some of the things that you've been learning about that you know already? There are legends … sure there are legends. That's a kind of folklore.

Folklore is like a big subject matter, like when you have English, it's composed of a lot of different things. (Talking to Student) You … are you just scratching your neck? I guess that's allowed. Anything else? That's all you know? Aren't you an advanced English class? All you know is that there are legends? There's got to be more. Come on.

There's myths too. Thank you very much. Legends, myths...fables. What? And there are folk tales, which is you know, so...Legends, myths, fables, folk tales. There's actually … if you were to get a PhD you get to study fun things like how rumors are spread, or how gossip starts, or graffiti, or you get to study folk life, how people celebrate various kinds of customs, you know, and how that gets passed on and so on and so forth. It's really a lot of stuff. And um, the thing that I've always focused in on is folk tales.

Fables, you know, are short stories with animals in them. They're different from other kinds of stories because they always, the animal isn't just an animal. It stands for something. So a lion stands for royalty or kingliness and a sheep stands for meekness, and a fox stands for cleverness, and everything stands for something. And they always have a moral at the end. So even though they're very short, little kids never get them. They're not really very good for little kids, you know. Even though a lot of people think so because they're short. What's the difference between a myth and a folktale?

Student: A myth, like, explains how something happens.… a long, long time ago.

Sometimes, but not always. There's one big difference. Got to have that on the clear. Myths, and I didn't get to, I was going to, I brought some myths that I'm working on. But myths always have gods in them. They can seem a lot like these other stories but they always, and they do often explain how things got to be, but they have gods. So Zeus or you know, Hermes, or you know, Hercules, or any one of those guys, and if you're in the Norse myths, I know you learned about Odin, the head of the gods. The day Wednesday day comes from Odin because Odin's old name was Wodin, so Wednesday is Wodin's Day. Thursday is Thor's Day. So that's named after Thor, the thunder god, that's my next manuscript I'm working on, stories of Thor the thunder god, very good stories. Oh, the best! Thursday. and Friday is named after another god, the chief of the lesser god named Fre, so it's Fre's Day. Friday, it became in time.

All the other words we got from the Vikings were things like murder, blood, axe, slaughter, pillage, plunder, all those things, 'cause you know what those guys are like. But actually all those words that are “g-g-g-” sound like that, slaughter, kill, those are all Viking words. Isn't that terrible?

So that's the big difference between myths and folk tales. Is they're very similar but these have gods. What about a legend? That's where you were at. It was supposed to have happened a long time ago. And it explains how something got to be the way it was. It's supposed to be true.

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