The Review of Contemporary Scientific and Academic Studies An International Multidisciplinary Online Journal www.thercsas.com ISSN: 2583-1380 Vol. 2 | Issue 10 | October 2022 Impact Factor: 4.736 (SJIF) __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Significance of the Lotha Nagas’ Folktale of Longlapa Liyingbeni R Kithan https://doi.org/10.55454/rcsas.2.10.2022.007 1 Significance of the Lotha Nagas’ Folktale of Longlapa Liyingbeni R Kithan (zestyrkithan2015@gmail.com ) Research Scholar, Department of English, William Carey University, Shillong, Meghalaya, India Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee The RCSAS (ISSN: 2583-1380) . This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ). Crossref/DOI: https://doi.org/10.55454/rcsas.2.10.2022.007 Abstract: Storytelling has been playing an important part in the Lotha community. The stories are of diverse content and tone, which involves various elements such as entertainment, education, humanity, and many other purposes. In this way, the folktales give people a collection of values, beliefs, attitudes, sense of belonging, and open the minds of people to their immediate surroundings and the world in general. Folktales are the pearls of wisdom or manifestation of the culture, as their essence contains the shared reminiscences of a tribe. It is also performed to instigate the audience with the value system and the body of knowledge infatuated and cherished by the oral society. Stories stand for the way humans explain reality to themselves. In oral cultures, the storyteller’s task is fundamental in codifying truths which have been painstakingly acquired, and in creating images that reflect the underlying principle on which such truths are based. Being artistic representations of life, folktales challenge and may even shock into action while training the mind in the quest for wisdom. Keywords: Folklore, Folktale of Longlapa, Lotha Society, Oral Tradition Introduction Folktales are images of private conduct and public morality, as the storyteller is society’s soul-searcher. The stories do not present a systematic exposition of dogma or the belief system, but the explanation of morality, social organization, of knowledge. They only reveal these elements indirectly, as they are dramatic representations that mirror the ancient and common wisdom of a tribe, which they express in a simple and down-to-earth fashion, especially through the actions of various characters. Social and moral values are taught and are absorbed through an emotional involvement in the performance. Oral societies have devised mechanisms for easy retention or memorization and therefore for easy recall. The great concern is that knowledge is retrievable because, as Ong states, “what cannot be recalled is wasted.” 1 While in a literate society, books are used to store and spread knowledge, the only means of preserving knowledge in an oral society is man’s memory, which must be helped to minimize wastage. Some material is learned through verbatim (‘word for word’) memorization, especially poetry and important formulaic sentences, such as proverbs. Other materials are stored in memory through simple, general content memorization, the creation of bold images, and artistic creative techniques and formulae, based on the use of parallelisms, repetitions, etc. Folktales, like all oral literature, must be performed. Therefore, Scheub refers to performance as “an artistically pleasing manner” 2 of transmission that involves the whole being, through word, rhythm, and dance. This “dramatization of values” 3 is a phenomenon that leads to socialization, since social standards are embodied in the hero. This reinforces the ethos on which community life is based. Folktales are also educational as they sometimes reveal human curiosity about the knowledge of naturally observable phenomena (e.g., why crabs are flat? How did humans gain supremacy over the creatures? Why do humans die and snakes regenerate?) And offer simple and imaginative answers to children’s endless questions. A powerful stimulation of the ‘faculty of imagination in children remains the basis for future discoveries. According to Levi- Strauss’ structural analysis of myth, “folktales reveal the opposing symbols used to delimit and better define cosmological and natural oppositions such as earth/sky, male/female, 1 Ong Walter J., Op cit. 2 Scheub,Harlod,The Technique of the Expansible Image in Xhosa NtsomiPerformances.In Researching African Literatures, Vol. 1, No. 2., 1970. 3 Ibid