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Abstract. This study investigates the history of Saudi folk heritage as well as the different historical and cultural factors that shaped Saudi folklore. Based on studies by eminent scholars of folk literature, such as William John Thoms, Walter J. Ong, Campbell, James Wynbrandt and Zwettler Michael, this study explains how folk elements pass down from generation to another, how they function significantly as a vehicle to transmit the nation's experience and demonstrate how such genres are relevant to the present human life. Saudi Arabia is a rich country in folkloric elements represented by the two most compelling folk genres of oral poetry and music. This research opens much-needed criteria of research on diverse heritage of a country that inherited from different cultures. Discussion in this study helps familiarize the readers with history of this country because an account of modern Saudi Arabian folk heritage without discussing these realities would be incomplete.
Keywords: Saudi Arabia, folklore, music, poetry, Najd, Hijaz, cultures
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3176/tr.2017.2.05
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...folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Angela Carter
1.Theoretical frame
Literature utters its voices in different forms for different functions. This encompasses written and oral forms of literature deviated from this broad and general category which, of course, includes the unofficial and unrecorded literature of the people. As a part of literature, folk literature is supposed to create spiritual edification, entertainment and beauty, broaden knowledge, reform personalities and refine our psyches. Further, folk literature has a wide range of functions on national levels. According to William R. Bascom, folk literature "serves to sanction and validate religious, social, political, and economic institutions, and to play an important role as an educative device in their transmission from one generation to another" (1953:284). The nonexistence of the physical manifestation of oral literature, text, is what distinguishes folklore from other literature. Walter J. Ong differentiates between the two discourses in a broader way by referring to folklore as "Oral structures" that "often look to pragmatics" while written discourse as "[c]hirographic structures look more to syntactic":
Written discourse develops more elaborate and fixed grammar than oral...