Folktales: treasures from unclaimed terrains

A folktale is shaped by many voices across time. They echo generations. Rarely written down, but remembered and retold. Never owned, but carried. A folktale is a story that lives in the oral tradition of a people, passed from mouth to ear, from elder to child, from stranger to another. It is shaped not by a single author but by the collective imagination of a community. And like all things born in the wild, folktales resist being contained.

They feature ordinary people, animals, spirits, moral dilemmas, and natural wonders. They carry the weight of local wisdom, shared fears, communal humour, and codes of survival. Folktales were used to share everyday wisdom, explain the inexplicable, and warn without scolding. They entertain with meaning. Traditionally transmitted through oral storytelling, later adapted into print and digital forms. Oral roots shape its rhythm, repetition, and memory-friendly structure.

A folktale is

• Mostly translated through oral origins, with growing print and digital transmission.

• Anonymous authorship, evolving with each retelling.

• Rooted in culture, shaped by rituals, beliefs, and the worldview of its people.

• Uses symbolism, using simple characters.

• Adaptable, changing slightly depending on who tells it and where.

• Voices vary, but gravitate towards overarching, all-knowing, genderless ones. 

• More often detached from personal bias, folktale narrations usually observe, guiding listeners through the story while allowing the lesson to reveal itself. Sometimes, didactic lessons are brought in, directly judging.

"Folktale narration often takes the form of an omniscient, timeless voice; one that is neither male nor female, neither young nor old. Folktales usually use simple language, rhythmic structure, and moral lessons."

In cultures with strong oral heritage, folktales preserve history, tradition, and identity. They encode ancient knowledge, how to read the stars, how to listen to the wind, how to live in harmony with the land. They teach through metaphor, not instruction. Through wonder, not doctrine.

Folktales are mirrors of the collective psyche; unclaimed because they belong to no one storyteller. They allow people to process awe, fear, grief, longing, and love. They are the wild stories of shared terrains. And like the flowers that bloom without permission, they remind us that wonder, meaning, and truth often grow accessible, unclaimed, uncontained, but entirely necessary.

Read another blog story featuring a Sri Lankan highland folktale drawn from that shared well.

The Garden of the Gods; a Sri Lankan folk tale that transcends myth

The Horton Plains, when the Garden of the Gods appears once in twelve years.

They say twelve years is a single day in the realm of gods. In a Sri Lankan folk tale, when a young celestial being fell in love with an earthly woman, this strange time-dilation became the premise of his heartbreak. In this story, we share the folktale The Garden of the Gods and how it entwines with reality in a natural phenomenon that takes place every twelve years.

In the highlands of the island, there was a village girl of great beauty. Every few days, she went into the forest to gather firewood. Her elders said to her, “Do not tarry; the forest is not a place to linger; return quickly, that you may assist your sister.” 

But the girl loved the forest. She gazed long upon the trees, and she wandered about seeking flowers.

At that time, a young god came down to the Earth. When the god beheld the maiden, he desired to draw near to her. Seeing that she was pleased at the sight of wild flowers, the god thought, “By flowers shall I keep her here for a long time.”

Then the god took the heavenly blossoms from the garland that he wore, and scattered them upon the hills and plains. Straightaway, those heavenly flowers spread out upon the earth, covering it in colours brighter than any flowers of this world. The green of the highland forest became a garden of the gods.

When the maiden came to gather wood, she saw the countless flowers, and her heart was filled with wonder. She forgot her household tasks and wandered long in the garden of the gods. 

Then the god took the form of a young man, fair to see, and he drew near to her. He spoke kindly, and she was pleased. At parting, he said, “I will return on the morrow. In this garden, we shall meet again.” 

But one day among the gods is twelve years on earth. Thus, though the maiden waited through days and through months, the god did not appear. At length she thought, “That day in the heavenly garden was but a dream,” and she gave it no more heed.

Yet the god was true to his word. On the morrow of the gods, after twelve earthly years, he came again to the highlands. The garden of the gods sprang forth upon the hills and the plains, in colours and in beauty without measure.

To this day, every twelfth year, the hills are clothed in blossoms, and the divine garden reappears on earth. There the young god waits, ever hopeful, for his earthly love.

Thus it is said: the garden of the gods still appears and vanishes, not to be possessed by human nor deity. To desire beauty is human, even divine. But to seek to possess it is folly.

Folk tales are often dismissed as stories unworthy of documentation. They rarely entered libraries until anthropologists, scholars, and revered intellectuals like Carl Jung began to expose their depth as tales springing from universal symbols common to humankind and the reservoirs of our collective unconscious. This story, The Garden of the Gods, not only draws from that shared well of wisdom, but it also entwines with a vivid natural phenomenon that takes place with uncanny resemblance to the folk tale. 

This happens in Sri Lanka’s world heritage site, Horton Plains, in the central highlands, where the tale is said to originate. Here, every twelve years, Strobilanthes species erupt in a synchronized mass flowering that transforms the highlands into a spectacle still described by locals as ‘the garden of the gods.’ As many as 33 Strobilanthes species take part, with at least 30 endemic, some critically endangered.

Strobilanthes kunthiana is one of the endangered species that takes part in the synchronized flowering. The mass flowering gives the Strobilanthes species a better chance at pollinating and surviving predators.

Folk tales usually spring up as unremarkably as wildflowers and disappear without getting recorded. They were transmitted by grandparents charged with containing restless children through stories, so that afternoons in households could remain sane. Sometimes those children retold the tales when they grew older, but most slipped quietly out of memory, especially as oral traditions changed. Rarely were they written down, unless an anthropologist or occasional story-keeper stumbled upon one too remarkable to let vanish; too wondrous to be forgotten.

This folk tale sparked lifelong wonder in those who first heard the story as children, only to later see it come true across the Horton Plains: myth confirmed by nature, wonder given form. For those alive when botanists explained the twelve-year flowering cycle of Strobilanthes in the 20th century, the awe deepened further with science and story converging. The tale will stir still more wonder for future generations who may never see all 33 species bloom again across Sri Lanka’s highlands, as many now hover on the edge of extinction.

Stories are timeless vessels of wonder. They are not escapes from reality but frames through which reality reveals itself. The Garden of the Gods is one such frame. It's a folk tale that carries—through myth, ecology, loss, and longing—the truth that beauty cannot be possessed. This is how stories distill truth into forms that are more accessible, memorable, and enduring. 

Letters are not iconic signs; they’re arbitrary symbols we trust.

This food for thought started when I accidentally stumbled upon a story about a 9-year-old prodigy taking college-level neuroscience classes. Particularly when I read that he started reading at the age of 2… he says he picked up the words naturally. It made me wonder how we recognize symbols, and why we trust their meaning.

Letters are symbols; they are a code whose meaning must be learned. A long time ago, they may have resembled something. Most, if not all, commonly used alphabets now function through social convention or cultural agreement.

The letter “A” doesn’t look like an “apple”

Learned association, not a visual metaphor.

Letters are what we call “symbolic" signs; in contrast to “iconic”, which resemble what they represent, for example, a male/female silhouette bathroom sign, or an “indexical” sign, which points to something by connection—for example, a crossed cannabis leaf to signify no smoking marijuana. 

Some people have exceptional pattern recognition. They notice recurring shapes, sounds, and contexts. It seems to come more naturally for them than others, like the 9-year-old prodigy in the story I read. But generally speaking, it’s a skill that can be practiced. If exposed to consistent visual-verbal pairings (like signs, books, or subtitles), they may intuitively map the symbol-sound through repetition. More practice, more understanding. This is the foundational logic of apprenticeship and education. The apprentice or student must be given the key to decoding the symbols.  

Is this Irving Penn photograph of Miles Davis' trumpet hand iconic or symbolic?

If letters are arbitrary, then reading is not just decoding—it’s trusting a system of shared meaning. Symbolic signs allow for abstraction; they allow us to communicate complex ideas and point to concepts that are difficult to signal; they describe the shapeless. They let us count, measure, and imagine. A flag doesn’t look like a country. Is Jasper Johns' “Flag” a painting, or a symbol? A cross doesn’t look like God. But we feel their weight because we’ve invested them with meaning. Is the cross sacred because of its form, or because of what we’ve invested in it? Ironically, they’re meaning can easily be forgotten. We must remember what the symbol stands for. We must believe others will interpret them similarly. And we must share enough cultural ground for the symbol to resonate. 

When we read, we enter a symbolic order.

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Food for thought.

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