The most obvious characteristic of folk literature is its orality. In spite of certain borderline cases, it normally stands in direct contrast to written literature. The latter exists in manuscripts and books and may be preserved exactly as the author or authors left it, even though this may have happened centuries or even millennia ago. Through these manuscripts and books the thoughts and emotions and observations and even the fine nuances of style can be experienced without regard to time or distance. With oral literature this is not possible. It is concerned only with speaking and singing and with listening, thus depending upon the existence of a living culture to carry on a tradition. If any item of folk literature ceases to exist within human memory it is completely lost.
The speaker or singer is carrying on a tradition learned from other speakers and delivered to a living audience. It may well be that the listeners have heard this material many times before and that it has a vigorous life in the community, and they will see to it that the performer does not depart too far from the tradition as they know it. If acceptable to the listeners, the story or song or proverb or riddle will be repeated over and over again as long as it appeals to men and women, even through the ages and over long geographic distances.
In some cultures nearly everyone can carry on these traditions, but some men and women are much more skillful than others and are listened to with greater pleasure. Whatever the nature of these tradition bearers, the continued existence of an item of oral literature depends upon memory. As it is passed on from one person to another, it suffers changes from forgetting or from conscious additions or substitutions; in any case, the item changes continually.
The more skillful tradition bearers take pride in the exactness with which they transmit a tale or song just as they have heard it many years before, but they only deceive themselves, for every performance differs from every other one. The whole material is fluid and refuses to be stabilized in a definite form. The teller is likely to find room for improvement and may well begin a new tradition that will live as long as it appeals to other tellers. It thus happens that in nearly all cultures certain people specialize in remembering and repeating what they have heard. There are semiprofessional storytellers around whom large groups of people assemble in bazaars or before cottage fires or in leisure hours after labour. Some of these storytellers have prodigious memories and may with only slight variations carry on to a new generation hundreds of tales and traditions heard long ago.
Certain bards and minstrels and song makers develop special techniques of singing or of telling epic or heroic tales to the accompaniment of a harp or other musical instrument. In the course of time in various places special poetic forms have been perfected and passed on from bard to bard. Such must have been the way in which the remarkably skillful heroic meters of the Greek epics were developed.
A different kind of oral tradition is preserved by the ritual specialists: priests, shamans, and others who perform religious ceremonies and healing rites. Frequently these rituals must be remembered word for word and are not believed to be effective unless they are correctly performed. The ideal of such priestly transmitters of oral tradition is complete faithfulness to that which has been passed down to them.
Not least important of the many reasons for the existence and perpetuation of folk literature is the need for release from the boredom that comes on long sea voyages or in army camps or on long winter evenings. Some folk literature is primarily didactic and tries to convey the information people need to carry on their lives properly. Among some peoples the relation of man and the higher powers is of special concern and gives rise to myths that try to clarify this relationship. Cooperative labour or marching is helped by rhythmic songs, and many aspects of social life give rise to various kinds of dance.
A great many of the special forms of literature now in manuscripts and books are paralleled in traditional oral literature, where history, drama, law, sermons, and exhortations of all kinds are found, as well as analogues of novels, stories, and lyric poems.
Folk literature is but a part of what is generally known as folklore: customs and beliefs, ritualistic behaviour, dances, folk music, and other nonliterary manifestations. These are often considered a part of the larger study of ethnology, but they are also the business of the folklorist.
Of special importance is the relation of all kinds of folk literature to mythology. The stories of Maui and his confreres in the Pacific and of gods and heroes of African or American Indian groups have behind them a long and perhaps complicated history. This is especially true of the highly developed mythologies of India, and the Greek, Irish, and Germanic pantheons. All are the results of an indefinitely long past, of growth and outside influences, of religious cults and practices, and of the glorification of heroes. But whatever the historical, psychological, or religious motivations, the mythologies are a part of folk literature and, though traditional, have been subject to continual changes at the hands of the tale-tellers, singers of stories, or priestly conductors of cults. Eventually singers or storytellers of philosophical tendencies have systematized their mythologies and have created with fine imagination the figures of Zeus and his Olympic family and his semidivine heroic descendants. Though the details of these changes are beyond the scope of this article, stories of the gods and heroes and of supernatural origins and changes on the earth have played an important role in all folk literature.