Folklore Across Cultures

The world is filled with many different types of cultures. And from these widely diverse yet similar cultures, comes a large variety of notable folklore. The techniques used in a few of the folklore stories I have recently read are comparable yet different in many ways.

The Daydreamer is a folklore story that came from India. This story dealt with money, and had a theme of forgiveness.The Daydreamer is about this guy who was paid by an oil man to bring his oil to a market. But instead of staying focused and getting it to the market, he daydreams and drops the jars of oil. Its setting was not in the wilderness, because of how a character was supposed to bring some oil to a market. The Daydreamer made human-to-human confrontations, and did not have an animal as an actual character in its plot. This non-scary story did not describe the creation of anything and had a happy ending.

Likewise, The Fisherman and the Bear, a folklore story coming from the U.S., was not a ghost story, worked out for the good in the end, and did not describe creation. In The Fisherman and the Bear, a fisherman has no luck in catching a fish but a bear catches a pile of them. Unlike The Daydreamer, this story did have an animal as a character. The animal had many human-like qualities. With a theme of judgement, this story didn’t have human-to-human confrontations. In the wilderness, The Fisherman and the Bear had to deal with hunting also. But the fisherman couldn’t catch a fish.

The First Tears is a story of creation that came from Canada.This story was the same as the The Fisherman and the Bear when it came to hunting is the wilderness and not catching a thing. The man failed at killing a seal for his family to eat, and gets upset enough to shed water from his eyes. Creating the first tears. Also like both previous stories, this folklore story was not a scary one and had a happy ending. It was similar to The Fisherman and the Bear in that they both had animals as characters. Unlike that story though, the animals did not have any human-like qualities about them. Like The Daydreamer, The First Tears had human-to-human confrontations too. The First Tears had a theme of caring an love.

Most folklore, no matter what culture it comes from, is meant to teach a lesson of some sort. This lesson is either described through the story’s setting, actions of characters, theme, etc. Some pieces of folklore are very similar, and some are very diverse. These three particular pieces do a good job at expressing their lessons both similarly and differently.