Myth and Folk-Tale

A psychological explanation of myth and folk-tale must start out with a definition and the difficulty that arises here is that the theory should not be implicit in the definition. Therefore the safe way would be to differentiate what is generally known as a myth from what is generally known as a folk-tale.

In a myth the actors are mostly divine and sometimes human. In a folk-tale the dramatis personae are mostly human and especially the hero is human frequently with supernatural beings as his opponents. In a myth we have definite locality; in a folk-tale the actors are nameless, the scene is just anywhere. A myth is part of a creed; it is believed by the narrator. The folk-tale is purely fiction, and not intended to be anything else. According to a method of interpretation which is now (luckily) extinct a myth always deals with natural phenomena, while according to another view which had advocates among the anthropologists of the previous generation and also has many influential representatives today, a myth is always connected with a ritual. In these views we have the elements of a theory and they go beyond what we should call a definition. Wundt and von der Leyen thought that the myth and the “Marchen” which are so similar to each other in certain ways and yet so different must have had one common origin, a type of narrative from which both have developed in the course of evolution (Mythen-marchen)1

I have collected myths and folk-tales in many areas and if I just make a hasty mental survey of my own collections I find that in some areas a clear line of distinction runs between the two while in others matters seem to be more confused. Now considering the magnitude of the task and the avowedly preliminary nature of this effort I will make matters easy for myself and consider the situation only in central Australia. Here we have a very clear