# Other Types of Folk Narrative

Besides tale and legend, there are several other genres that also belong to folklore. The anecdote (anekdota) is a humorous, snappy, short narrative, mostly connected in action with a definite person and place. It contains a great many itinerant elements, which assures the genre’s mobility. It is still a live and expanding genre today. The trufa is also a humorous story, its humour usually coarse. This was also the name for the uproariously funny theatrical performances at fairs or other folk gatherings in the Middle Ages. While the trufa achieved a more or less permanent form, narrative accounts (elbeszélés) about personal adventures (soldiering, work, family, etc.) became polished during the course of frequent repetition.

We shall discuss in more detail the idioms, proverbs, and riddles, which are the smallest, yet important creations of folk prose.

Proverbs (közmondás) and idiomatic sayings (szólás) are condensed expressions of the people’s wisdom, of their often ironic, mocking cleverness, of their sagacity hardened by painful and victorious battles over the centuries, and these idioms also had their effect in literature. Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, the Hungarians János Arany, Sándor Petőfi, Mór Jókai, Kálmán Mikszáth, all use such condensing, prosaic and yet epigrammatic elements of folk poetry. Idomatic sayings and proverbs have a power of expression which is the innermost property of the language and at the same time is more than a matter of mere linguistics, of simple sentence structure; the condensing power of folk experience and adventures, parables is alive in it.

Proverbs and idiomatic sayings demonstrate best the social and collective nature of folklore. Individual creation is wrapped in deeper anonymity in them than in any other genre. Even in literature there are characters who constantly use proverbs, who answer the most varied phenomena of life with sayings, etc. Furthermore, ethnographers often have the good fortune to meet inexhaustible knowers and inventors of proverbs. However, when we consider the characteristic features of {595.} idiomatic sayings and proverbs, first the communal nature and lack of individual character must be mentioned.

Secondly, a trait which may be called “general usage” characterizes idiomatic sayings, which means that in a given time–because idioms also have a historical age–the community, mostly the entire community of the nation, consistently uses such idioms and proverbs. They are used almost spontaneously and with identical meaning, part of the vocabulary, but more meaningful than a mere linguistic expression, and they appear to be something like a communal poetic quotation of common origin.

The third characteristic of idiomatic sayings and proverbs is their stabilizing formal structure, which follows from this and is related to all that we have said so far. In proverbs, stable formal structure is primarily expressed by the aspiration to condensation and brevity. We must emphasize also that idioms and proverbs differ significantly from simple linguistic expressions.