As I study German #folklore , I am constantly reminded how very, very lucky Germany was that there was a mass movement of scholars who had an interest in writing those tales down before the oral storytelling traditions they came from ended.
German folk storytelling thrived in environments when large households - or even several households - gathered together on a regular basis. As a result, such storytelling continued well into the 1950s, but then largely died out as family sizes became smaller and family units became more splintered.
But until then, thousands of people - scholars and lay enthusiasts alike - gathered tens of thousands of tales and published thousands of works - a rich body of scholarship that Germans today (such as myself) still profit from.
So if you live in a part of the world where such oral storytelling traditions still exist (I know that this is the case for parts of #SouthAsia and #SouthEastAsia , for example), then please support any organized efforts to write them down. Future generations _will_ be grateful!
https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Sagen