Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in a literature class.
Professor: All right, so now we’ve talked about folk legends and seen that their ... one of their key features is there’s usually some real history behind them. They are often about real people, so you can identify with the characters, and that’s what engages us in them.
The particular stories might not be true and some of the characters or events might be made up. But there’s still a sense that the story could have been true since it is about a real person. That’s distinct contrast from the other main branch of popular storytelling, which is folk tales.
Folk tales are imaginative stories that ... um ... like folk legends, they have been passed down orally, from storyteller to storyteller for ... since ancient times. But with folk tales you don’t ever really get the sense that the story might have been true. They are purely imaginative and so quite revealing, I think anyway, about the culture and the connection between folk tales and culture, which we’ll talk about.
But first let’s go over the various types of folk tale and focus specifically on Norwegian folk tales since they illustrate the variety pretty well. There are in general three main types of Norwegian folk tales.
One is animal stories, where animals are the main characters. They can be wild animals or domestic, and a lot of times they can talk and behave like humans, but at the same time, they retain their animal characteristics too. They tend to involve animals like bears, wolves and foxes.
The point of these stories, their, their internal objectives, so the speak, is usually to explain some feature of the animal, how it arose. So there’s one about a fox who fools a bear into going ice fishing with his tail. When the bear puts his tail into the water through a hole in the ice, to try and catch a fish, the ice freezes around it, and he ends up pulling his tail off. So that’s why bears to this day have such short tails.
The second category of Norwegian folk tale is the supernatural. Eh ... stories about giants and dragons and trolls, and humans with supernatural powers or gifts, like invisibility cloaks. Or where people are turned into animals and back again into a person, those are called transformation stories.
There’s a well-known Norwegian supernatural folk tale, a transformation story called East of the Sun and West of the Moon, which we’ll read. It involves a prince who is a white bear by night and a human by day. And he lives in the castle that’s east of the Sun and west of the Moon, which the heroine in the story has to try to find.
Besides being a good example of a transformation story, this one also has a lot of the common things that tend to show up in folk tales.You will find the standard opening, ‘once upon a time ... ’ . And it has stock characters like a prince, and a poor but beautiful peasant girl, she is the heroine I mentioned. And ... um ... it has a very conventional form. So no more than two characters are involved in any one scene. And it has a happy ending.
And it’s ... the story is presented as though ... well, even though a lot of the actions that occurred are pretty fantastic, so you’d never think of it as realistic. The characters still act like ... they resemble real people. They are not real or even based on historical figures. But you might have a supernatural story involving a king, and he’d act like you’d expect a Norwegian king to act.
OK. The third main kind of folk tale is the comical story. We’ll say more later about these, but for now, just be aware of the category and that they can contain supernatural aspects, but they are usually more playful and amusing overall than supernatural stories.
Now, as I said, traditionally, folk tales were just passed down orally. Each generation of storytellers had their own style of telling a story. But ... um ... in Norway, before the 19th century, folk tales were just for kids. They weren’t seen as worthy of analysis or academic attention. But this changed when the Romantic Movement spread throughout Europe in the mid-19th century.
Romantics looked at folk tales as sort of a reflection of the soul of the people. So there was something distinctly Norwegian in folk tales from Norway. And there was renewed pride in the literature and art forms of individual countries. As a result, the first collection of Norwegian folk tales is published in 1852. And there have been many new editions published since then. For the people of Norway, these stories are now an important part of what it means to be Norwegian.
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