Myth, Legend, and Folktale as Categories of Folklore - A Heuristic Extension of Bascom and Littleton

The classification of narratives into myths, legends, and folktales, is an important part of folkloristics as it helps the understanding of a story’s function within society. However, the categorisations of myth, legend, and folktale are often treated as fixed typologies, which in turn highlights ambiguity if a narrative transforms due to a shift in cultural belief or a change in the landscape of that story. This paper recognises the ambiguity that narrative transformation can bring, and in response, introduces the Narrative Classification Matrix, a two-axis heuristic model that distinguishes the narrative’s authority, its socially enforced epistemic commitment, with that of the narrative’s relative place in the world, its ontological time and setting. This paper further argues that “history” should be removed as a folklore genre, treating it instead as a scientific stance.