The Tradegy of the Heritage we are Lost
Our present days depict a multicultural landscape of the world. We travel daily to different districts of the country in which we reside. Even more, sometimes we go far beyond the boundaries of our own countries to see the world or for business purposes.
During our travels we rarely think about the historical perspectives or the impact we have on the environment through which we are passing at a given moment. Our ancestors, however, lived quite differently.
In those old, legendary times, survival itself was the primary and most difficult task that people pursued. At times this task could become almost impossible. Adaptation and success in adaptive strategies became essential, and such solutions needed to be remembered. In one way or another, these solutions had to be recorded and transmitted.
As we know today, writing skills were not present in every culture of humanity. In fact, only a few cultural clusters in the world could boast of such an extraordinary invention as a developed writing system.
But how could communities preserve the experience that was so vital for the survival of a particular social group? We may suggest that one of the earliest mechanisms of such collective memory was storytelling. Yes—tales: the very stories that even today we tell to our friends, our children, and our parents. They, in turn, pass these stories to other members of the community, and those members share them further, and so on, generation after generation.
You may now rightly ask: where does the author see the tragedy in all this? Such a question would be entirely reasonable. The tragedy is concealed within the very strategy of civilizational development, in much the same way that it exists in all evolutionary processes. Predators hunt their prey; likewise, the hunger of large social groups rarely knows its boundaries.
When a human group grew large enough to expand its territory, other human groups in earlier times were often perceived as alien—simply another element of the surrounding environment that could, and perhaps should, be used like any other resource nature offered. Thus, the conquest of neighboring tribes became a regular and ordinary pattern of behavior.
As one may suppose, the heritage of the conquered group could follow two possible paths. If the conquered community was absorbed and integrated into the more powerful conqueror, some of its remembered traditions and folklore could survive within the dominant social structure. But if the group vanished entirely, its fate was the same as that of the bearers of its traditions—its cultural memory disappeared completely from the surface of the earth.
Now you may more clearly understand the passages we have presented to the reader, as well as the deeper meaning of the fairy tales and legends collected by scientific enthusiasts who traveled through many regions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These collections represent a treasure—often the only surviving record—and constitute extremely valuable scientific material available to us today. In many ways they may serve humanity even now: we may read these tales to children, study them in classrooms, analyze them from historical perspectives, and apply them in countless other ways that it is not necessary to enumerate here.
Here we can only recommend that you proceed to the main navigation menu, where you will find collections of the aforementioned folk narratives. They are carefully written and organized by cultural sections—Czech, Chinese, and many others—each presented with the respect it deserves. The collective authors sincerely wish you a pleasant and enriching time reading these remarkable stories that have reached us from the legendary depths of the past.