ABSTRACT
It is not really so very long ago that scholars were using the oral medium as a defining criterion of folklore. For the folklorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this is indeed understandable since they perceived their task as being one of ‘a rescue operation, a reconstruction of the past from relics in the memory of the old people’ (Dégh, 1994, p.5). Folklore was seen as a product of a pre-literate society and the oral nature of the transmission of folktales in traditional communities was seen as definitive, and, indeed, in the face of growing industrialisation and developing technology, there was an undoubted attraction to the pastoral nostalgia that folklore represented. In his preface to Folk Culture in a World of Technology (Bausinger, 1990), the German folklorist Hermann Bausinger criticises this stance:
In Germany folklore and folk life were not so much realities but anti-modernist constructions based on a repressive ideology and compensating for the alienation of modern life
(Bausinger, 1990, p.xi).