What a Wonderful World of Legends!

In the modern world, folktales, legends and rumours reach us through various channels: they spread in oral communication, and can be read in fiction books, on the Internet, and in the written books. We can listen to these texts, read and sometimes even watch their adaptations in television programmes, feature films, ant theatre plays in the visual media.
For an folklore researcher, stories and their relation to the tradition are as important as the issues of the contect and meaning in these texts. Indeed, the majority of these traditional texts affect us one way or another and call us to express our opinion, discuss and debate, and thus inevitably have an impact on our collective consciousness.
What has to be remembered is that the tales from different sources, written and told at different times by different authors and narrators all share the same content – these stories tell us about ourselves, about the system of concepts and values that matter to us.