Folklorists generally resist universal interpretations of narratives and, wherever possible, analyze oral versions of tellings in specific contexts, rather than print sources, which often show the work or bias of the writer or editor.

Folklorists often go further, defining myths as " tales believed as true, usually sacred, set in the distant past or other worlds or parts of the world, and with extra-human, inhuman, or heroic characters ".

Folklorists such as Gwenith Gwynn, interviewing people in the early twentieth century, were unwittingly discovering folk memories of a Victorian misunderstanding rather than an actual, earlier folk practice.

Folklorists of the first decade of the 20th century, especially those from Britain, included shanties among their interests in collecting folk songs connected with the idea of national heritage.

Folklorists have documented folk versions with obscene lyrics from the 19th century.

Folklorists have attempted to determine the origin by internal evidence, which can not always be clear ; Joseph Jacobs, comparing the Scottish tale The Ridere of Riddles with the version collected by the Brothers Grimm, The Riddle, noted that in The Ridere of Riddles one hero ends up polygamously married, which might point to an ancient custom, but in The Riddle, the simpler riddle might argue greater antiquity.

Folklorists have long studied variants on this tale across cultures.

Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie have observed in The Classic Fairy Tales ( 1974 ) that " the tenor of Jack's tale, and some of the details of more than one of his tricks with which he outwits the giants, have similarities with Norse mythology.

Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie point out in The Classic Fairy Tales ( 1999 ) that the tale has a " partial analogue " in " Snow White ": the lost princess enters the dwarves ' house, tastes their food, and falls asleep in one of their beds.

Folklorists associate the practice with the widespread British custom of blacking up for mumming and morris dancing, and suggest there is no record of slave ships coming to Padstow.

Folklorists have suggested that the most popular legends about Whittington — that his fortunes were founded on the sale of his cat, who was sent on a merchant vessel to a rat-beset Eastern emperor — originated in a popular 17th-century engraving by Renold Elstracke in which his hand rested on a cat, but the picture only reflects a story already in wide circulation.

Folklorists and cultural anthropologists such as P. Saintyves and Edward Burnett Tylor saw Little Red Riding Hood in terms of solar myths and other naturally occurring cycles, stating that the wolf represents the night swallowing the sun, and the variations in which Little Red Riding Hood is cut out of the wolf's belly represent the dawn.

Folklorists who have collected traditional music of Massachusetts include Eloise Hubbard Linscott, whose field recordings from 1938 and 1941 are in the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

Folklorists have classified fairy tales in various ways.

Folklorists of the " Finnish " ( or historical-geographical ) school attempted to place fairy tales to their origin, with inconclusive results.

Folklorists have suggested that their actual origin lies in a conquered race living in hiding, or in religious beliefs that lost currency with the advent of Christianity.

Folklorists sometimes divide oral tales into two main groups: Märchen and Sagen.

Folklorists of the 19th century saw these figures as Celtic fairies.

Folklorists have proposed that the mine kobold derives from the beliefs of the ancient Germanic people.

History of British Folklore, Volume I: The British Folklorists: A History.

James Sharpe, in The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: the Western Tradition, states: " Folklorists began their investigations in the 19th Century found that familiars figured prominently in ideas about witchcraft.

Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie indicate in The Classic Fairy Tales ( 1974 ) that " Hansel and Gretel " belongs to a group of European tales especially popular in the Baltic regions about children outwitting ogres into whose hands they have involuntarily fallen.

Folklorists and cultural anthropologists such as P. Saintyves and Edward Burnett Tylor saw " Little Red Riding Hood " in terms of solar myths and other naturally-occurring cycles.

Robert Winslow Gordon, Lomax's predecessor at the Library of Congress, had written ( in an article in the New York Times, c. 1926 ) that, " Nearly every type of song is to be found in our prisons and penitentiaries " Folklorists Howard Odum and Guy Johnson also had observed that, " If one wishes to obtain anything like an accurate picture of the workaday Negro he will surely find his best setting in the chain gang, prison, or in the situation of the ever-fleeing fugitive.

In his work Semantography Bliss had not provided a systematic set of definitions for his symbols ( there was a provisional vocabulary index instead ( 1965, pp. 827 – 67 )), so McNaughton ’ s team might often interpret a certain symbol in a way that Bliss would later criticize as a “ misinterpretation ”.

Critics often interpret Banquo's role in the play as being a foil to Macbeth, resisting evil where Macbeth embraces it.

Color codes are often difficult for color blind and blind people to interpret.

Google services are often blocked by filters, but these may most often be bypassed by using https :// in place of http :// since content filtering software is not able to interpret content under secure connections ( in this case SSL ).

They often interpret passages of the Bible as being less a record of actual events, but rather stories illustrating how to live ethically and authentically in relation to God.

However, since the Civil War Era, the national courts often interpret the federal government as the final judge of its own powers under dual federalism.

State theorists interpret the effects of hypnotism as due primarily to a specific, abnormal, and uniform psychological or physiological state of some description, often referred to as " hypnotic trance " or an " altered state of consciousness.

Second, scribes often used many abbreviations, usually so as to write more quickly and sometimes to save space, so the specialist-palaeographer must know how to interpret them.

Even for observational data, statistical theory provides a way of calculating a value that can be used to interpret a sample of data from a population, it can provide a means of indicating how well that value is determined by the sample, and thus a means of saying corresponding values derived for different populations are as different as they might seem ; however, the reliability of inferences from post-hoc observational data is often worse than for planned randomized generation of data.

The most common symbol of Unitarian Universalism is the flaming chalice, often framed by two overlapping rings that many interpret as representing Unitarianism and Universalism ( the symbol has no official interpretation ).

Another question about the objectivity of observations relates to the so called " experimenter's regress ", as well as to other problems identified from the sociology of scientific knowledge: as with all forms of human reasoning, the people who interpret the observations or experiments always have cognitive and social biases that lead them, often in an unconscious way, to introduce their own interpretations into their description of what they are ' seeing '.

The nature of warfare provides several factors which exacerbate these effects ; the fog of war means that information about the enemy forces is often limited or inaccurate, making it easy for the intelligence process to interpret the information to agree with existing assumptions, or to fit it to their own preconceptions and expectations.

However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes — in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense — considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes which are of relevance to the way humans interpret meaning.

Unchecked, what follows from under-cutting is the production of false data often from the failure to spot intrusive finds and in turn, serious ramifications for the ability to interpret the sequence post-excavation.

Photographic evidence is often difficult to interpret.

Notice the question mark: this is often ( though by no means always ) used by compilers to indicate this sort of clue is one where you need to interpret the words in a different fashion.

The Bible colleges prepared ministers who lacked college or seminary experience with intense study of the Bible, often using the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, which was the King James version with detailed notes explaining how to interpret Dispensationalist passages.

The problem with the point and the comma as either decimal mark or digit group separator is that, internationally, they have both often been used for both meanings, and their meaning is context-dependent ( one must know which notational system is being used in order to interpret them ).

Those statements were not often easy to interpret, unlike Kekkonen's blunt and sometimes harsh statements ( see, for example, " The Republic's President 1956-1982 "/ Tasavallan presidentti 1956-1982, published in Finland in 1993-94 ; " The Republic's President 1982-1994 "/ Tasavallan presidentti 1982-1994, published in Finland in 1993-94 ; Mauno Koivisto, " Two Terms I: Memories and Notes, 1982-1994 "/ Kaksi kautta I. Muistikuvia ja merkintöjä 1982-1994, Helsinki: Kirjayhtymä Publishing Ltd., 1994 ).

Additionally, it is often rather difficult to interpret the musical notation used to write them down.

Palmists interpret this line to represent matters of the heart, that is, more literally, our emotional living ; it is therefore believed to be an insight into how the emotional sides of our mindframes will act out and be acted upon during our lifetimes, and often said, to what extent we possess emotional reservoirs within us, for example, a chained or gridded heart line ( or emotional line ) is often seen in people who are highly strung, nervous and draw upon emotional strength and insight to attain their ambitions, i. e. they wear their ' emotions ' on their sleeves, often to draw strength.

While the judicial system has noted that the laws are largely symbolic and non prohibitive, supervisors and managers often interpret them to mean English is the mandatory language of daily life.