folk memory

Definitions

1. 1

   The collective lore, beliefs, and traditional stories which help to define a society,…

   The collective lore, beliefs, and traditional stories which help to define a society, culture, or nation.

   • That leisured past . . . is insistently evoked in Mr. Kiely's new collection. A compendium of folk memory, it features great bursts of balladry and doggerel.
   • James Wilson would have been bewildered and horrified to learn that 150 years later Britain is credited in the Irish folk memory—and general liberal opinion—with callously allowing a million people to starve to death.
   • Arguments about the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor . . . underpinned the popular fear and loathing of the workhouse that endure in folk memory.
2. 2

   A belief, traditional story, or the like, which is common to the people of a particular…

   A belief, traditional story, or the like, which is common to the people of a particular culture; especially, such a belief or piece of knowledge that is not consciously held but is nonetheless known.

   • But behind these folk-memories of national history, extending over more than a thousand years, there is, in the popular consciousness, a dim background of a far earlier period.
   • In the island of Lewis, librations [sic] were offered, to "Shoney," a sea fairy, in order to bring seaweed, this being a folk-memory of an ancient sea god or goddess, to whom offerings of ale were made by the Vikings at Halloween.
   • Did the watchers retain a folk memory that they themselves resulted from a mating of different types: a black human and a pale Neanderthal?

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