Folk Literature
Folk literature is – like music, customs and rituals – an element of rural folklore. Its old forms were anonymous and were passed down from generation to generation orally, in spoken or sung form. They were recorded in writing by ethnographers and lovers of folk culture. From the 19th century onwards, they noted down texts they had heard in the countryside: fairy tales, legends, tales, sayings, proverbs, songs and so on.
Genres of folk literature were linked to specific life situations of peasants. Annual customs, e.g. Christmas, were associated with the texts of nativity plays and carols, Easter with przywołówki and Dyngus songs. Family rituals were accompanied by songs, e.g. the wedding songs, or the vigil songs, performed for the deceased. At games, folk ditties were sung. Prayer books, Marian songs and songs about saints were religious in nature. Other songs were associated with specific professions, e.g. shepherd songs, rafting songs, soldier songs, tales about millers, blacksmiths. At leisure, fairy tales, legends and anecdotes were listened to, which, in addition to their entertaining function, also had cognitive and didactic functions. Numerous proverbs and sayings were associated with life and farm knowledge.
A characteristic feature of traditional folk literature, apart from the fact that it was anonymous and circulated by oral transmission, is its multivariant nature and universality. Different versions of the same song, carol, saying or proverb were known in many localities, regions and even ethnic groups. Fairy tales, often with very old origins, are a good example of this. For example, versions of the old Arabian fairy tale O Ali Babie i czterdziestu rozbójnikach [About Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers], known in Europe for about 300 years, and Jaś i Małgosia [Hansel and Gretel], a fairy tale popularised in the early 19th century by the Grimm brothers, were also told in Kuyavia under the titles of Bajka o Zbójcach [The Robbers’ Tale] and O czarownicy [The Witch’s Tale].
In the 20th century, new genres of folk literature were added to the traditional ones, e.g. the novel, the diary, poetry and ritual performance texts, also known as “peasant writing”. Authors of works in this trend were no longer anonymous. The term “folk literature” also began to be used in a broader sense, in relation to literary works devoted to peasant issues or created by people from this social stratum. Examples include the novels about villagers written in the mid-20th century by Leokadia Boniewicz, born in the Chełmno area, and the diary of Jan Drabikowski, a blacksmith from Kuyavia, which are held in the Folklore Archive of the Ethnographic Museum in Toruń.
Traditional folk literature is one of the elements of intangible cultural heritage, and many of its genres are still alive, passed on to next generations. In everyday life, people are still accompanied by proverbs, weather forecasts, and in festive time – harvest songs, carols and, in some regions, speeches and orations by carol singers. We still like to tell, read and listen to fairy tales, while local legends and tales are important for the inhabitants of many villages. Nowadays, their literary variants are widely available in the form of numerous publications, also in audiovisual form. Old diary accounts, memoirs and novels are an invaluable source of knowledge about the past, life, mentality, values and views of our predecessors. Despite the fact that the UNESCO convention defining what phenomena count as intangible cultural heritage mentions only oral transmissions, it is worth appreciating all forms of folk literature, including those in the form of records, which are often a testimony to our identity.
