Secondary Tales of the Two Great Epics

Author(s): Rajendra I Nanavati
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 26

Introductory
with and deepened in the feelings of devotion and religiosity. And this is perhaps. the only uniformity that can rightly be pointed out as universal among all the secondary tales of the two great epics.
Form, Content and Function: Their Inter-relation
After establishing the characteristic of the two epics as collections of folk-tales and seeing their distinctions from other collections, we should now try to clarify the connotations of the terms in the second part of the title: "A Study of their Form, Content and Function."
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The term 'Function' hardly needs an explanation. The purpose with which tale is told or with which a secondary tale is brought into the principal story is its function. It is the role a tale plays either in the epic or independently.
or
The term 'Content' also is comparatively clear. The ingredients from which a tale is made are its 'content'. The characters of a tale, or their actions, the results of their actions are the ingredients that go to make up a tale. Technically, we call them the 'motifs' of a tale. "The motif is the smallest recognizable element that goes to make up a complete story". It is "a word or pattern of thought that recurs in a similar situation, or to evoke a similar mood, within a work, or in various works of a genre." With the help of this motif-analysis, it has been possible to recognise 'motifs' and 'types' as the complementary concepts in the study of folk-tales. The importance of motifs "for comparative study is to show. what material of a particular type is common to other types. The importance of the type is to show the way in which narrative motifs form into conventional clusters."42 Thus the arrangement of certain motifs in a certain way or the recurrence of certain motif-clusters in numerous tales would give us one type of tales.
But this 'type' is different from the 'form' of a folk-tale. By 'form' we understand one of the forms of folk-tale like myth, legend, fairy-tale, fable etc. The two terms 'type' and 'form' can be shown to be overlapping to extent because the basis of both the analyses of tales into types and into forms is the consideration of the content of a tale, but without complicating the mitter we can simply point out that the recurrence of certain motif-patterns gives us the type of a tale while its form is decided by the nature of its content as well as the mode of treatment of the content.
The term 'Form' is defined as "the character of an object as experienced or the structure into which the elements of an experience or a thing are organised.""
40 Dictionary of World Literary Terms, Ed. J. T. Shipley, 1970, p. 126. 41 ibid. p. 204.
42 Dictionary of World Literary Terms, Ed. J. T. Shipley, 1970, p. 126. 43 ibid. p. 127.