By retelling folktales one can gain insights into the similarities and differences of peoples around the world. I've traveled around the world without leaving home. I go anywhere my imagination wants to roam. I take a look, in a folktale book, and travel on the wings of words. Although folktales are imaginative narratives, they are shelved in the nonfiction area of social sciences.
Folktales offer profound insights into the cultures from which they come.
Exploring Cultural Roots through Folktales By asking family members about the ancestry of relatives, people often discover that their family tree has roots in many places around the world. It is interesting to explore a folktale from one's own heritage in the 398.2 section of the library. Since the invention of writing, oral tales may have always been written by community scribes. However, since literacy has not been commonplace in the world until modern times, old folktales were preserved from one generation to the next primarily through the spoken word. Guttenburg's invention of the moveable type printing press in 1450 allowed for the development of the book printing industry.