Folk Literature & Fable, VǫL-ʿAN
Step into the world of folklore, fables, legends, tall tales, and epics, in which heroes are known to undertake arduous journeys and dragons, fairies, and giants abound. Stories such as these circulated long before systems of writing were developed; ballads, folktales, poems, and the like were transmitted exclusively by word of mouth before written languages took over, and they continue to captivate listeners and readers to this day.
Folk Literature & Fable Encyclopedia Articles By Title
Vǫlsunga saga, most important of the Icelandic sagas called fornaldarsǫgur (“sagas of antiquity”). Dating from......
Nancy Ward was a Native American leader who served as an important intermediary in relations between early American......
wendigo, a mythological cannibalistic monster in the spiritual tradition of North American Algonquian-speaking......
werewolf, in popular legend, a human who can shape-shift into a wolf or a hybrid wolf-human form. In many werewolf......
T. H. White was an English novelist, social historian, and satirist who was best known for his brilliant adaptation......
Oscar Wilde was an Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose enduring fame rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian......
Wolfdietrich, Germanic hero who appears in the Middle High German poems of Ortnit and Wolfdietrich in Das Heldenbuch......
Johann Rudolf Wyss was a folklorist, editor, and writer, remembered for his collections of Swiss folklore and for......
Yamato Takeru, Japanese folk hero, noted for his courage and ingenuity, who may have lived in the 2nd century ad.......
Yorimitsu, one of the most popular of the legendary Japanese warrior heroes and a member of the martial Minamoto......
Ysopet, in French literature, a medieval collection of fables, often versions of Aesop’s Fables. The word Ysopet......
Betty Zane was an American frontier heroine whose legend of valour in the face of attack by American Indians provided......
Zwarte Piet is a character in Dutch folklore who serves St. Nicholas (in Dutch, Sinterklaas) in St. Nicholas Day......
Ōkuninushi, in the mythology of the Izumo branch of Shintō in Japan, the central hero, a son-in-law of the storm......
Romance of ʿAntar, tales of chivalry centred on the Arab desert poet and warrior ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, one of the......