Tradition: definition, concept, meaning

"The tragedy of antiquity of the deep, the affairs of bygone days ..." These lines from the very childhood hear, see, read every Russian-speaking person. Thus began his work "Ruslan and Lyudmila" Alexander Pushkin. Are the legends of his fairy tales really true? To know for sure, you need to understand the concepts.

Poetry is poetry, tales of fairy tales, but what does the word "tradition" mean? The definition and special features of this phenomenon will be considered in our article.

Tradition as a genre

We will begin our acquaintance with the world of folk traditions with the definition of the concept itself. So, different sources give us the following.

Tradition is a prosaic folklore genre, the subject of which is historical facts in the folk interpretation. The traditions of the people are not connected with the genre of the fairy tale, although sometimes the events are reminiscent of mythical or fairy-tale.

Traditions in the theory of literature are divided into two large groups according to the type of the plot: historical and toponymic.

Traditions - part of oral folk prose

We learned what a legend is. The definition gave us a general idea. Let's talk about one feature of this genre. It is noteworthy that legends 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 the information medium, tens or even hundreds of transformations of the plot, images could have occurred.

The creations of the famous Greek poet Homer "Iliad" and "Odyssey", having an incredible size, were also transmitted verbally. They also described historical events, embellished and somewhat modified. In this there is some similarity of these creations with newer legends.

As a genre of oral prose, legends admire its long history. Fortunately, and maybe not, in our time, their distribution in the recorded form is much simpler. We should appreciate every word, tradition, which gives important spiritual knowledge about ancestors.

Comparison with other folklore prosaic genres

Traditions can sometimes be mistakenly defined as a legend or bylina. In order to avoid this, let us call such a regularity: the 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. A tradition is a retelling of the folk style of history with the participation of well-known or famous in the local area heroes.

From epic legends of the people differ content, actors (historical figures: robbers, rulers, ordinary people, artisans), the participation of real known in a certain locality of persons who have become mythological heroes.

Characteristic for this genre of folklore prose is the narrative from a third person about events related to the past. The narrator of the legends was not an eyewitness of events, but transmits the story heard from third parties.

Historical legends

Collective folk memory created ancient legends from real facts, which we can read in a slightly different light in history textbooks. This created historical legends.

Historical legends include Jeanne d'Arc, Tsar Ivan the Terrible, Ataman Mazepa and others.

This includes the biblical stories about the creation of the world, the withdrawal of the Israelis from Egypt in search of their land and many others.

This group includes such traditions that absorb the ideas of people about the creation of their world. All folklore units create a single historical and mythological world, reflecting a broad picture of the people's view of the surrounding reality.

The time frame covered by the legends is difficult to determine: it is information from the biblical antiquity to the present day.

Toponymic Traditions

Toponymic traditions include stories that record events that became the basis for the origin of a particular name. Their heroes are, respectively, local famous characters and events that matter only there. The study of such local stories is an interesting part of toponymic and ethnographic research.

Toponymic are short stories about the Zmiyiv Valakh (from the Serpent), the city of Kiev (about Kie, his brothers and sister), the city of Orsha (Prince Orsha and his daughter Orsha), the city of Lviv and many other toponymic objects.

Prospects for Researchers

In each city, each village there are such short stories about where some local name came from. Collections of such legends can be made endlessly. There is a field for research today. Therefore, anyone who has discovered legends and found them an interesting object of activity, there is work.

To publish a collection of legends collected in a specific locality is a very real prospect. New names appear today, right at this moment. Also in remote areas of Russia there are such settlements in which folklore is actively developing. Hence, new boundaries for ethnographic and folklore work are emerging.

It is noteworthy that at the present time there are more topographic legends. Historical are preserved from previous eras, since from a certain time the fixation of all the facts occurs instantly after their appearance.

Traditions, myths and their historical background

Tradition, the definition of which we have already given, is sometimes associated with mythology. Thus, the stories about the exploits of the Greek hero Hercules, as the researchers believe, could not have arisen without real historical facts. Those mythical events and heroes, with which the likely real history of the adventures of Hercules grew, appeared with the passage of time.

Some facts from the Book of Enoch, in which the giants were mentioned, were confirmed. In the same way, architectural memorials were found that could be witnesses of events that became the basis of the legend of the World Flood.

conclusions

Thus, we learned that tradition is a faithful, by mouth, folk story about historical events. In the process of transfer, carriers tend to embellish the 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. Studying and comparing them with the facts of the history of various nationalities, one can draw conclusions about the outlook of the people who lived at that time. The value of retelling for ethnology is also extremely high.

Folk legends, historical and toponymic, everyone heard, but could not pay attention to this diamond, cut during the years of transfer from mouth to mouth. Now we can appreciate what we know and what we hear about the surrounding cultural world. Let our article prove useful to you and give an opportunity to look at the creativity of the people from the other side.