Ordinary Banana

Is “folklore mindset” nihilist if you believe that stories are valuable, but are still trying to figure out what stories are for?

folklore mindset: evaluating cultural items that are “told for true” in literary and cultural terms, independent of their truth value

I don't understand what "told for true" means here. This idea sounds Taleban.

it’s one way folklorists distinguish legends from fairytales - legends are told as if true, meant to be believed (like news stories)

Ah so "told for true" is a sort of term of art for an assumed folkloric consensus that everybody politely pretends to buy? No that does not sound nihilist to me. More like a sort of "don't think too much" faith.

Is that in reference to participating in "told for true" stories themselves, or to taking an ethnomethodologically emic stance toward said "told for true" items. The former seems non-nihilistic. The latter maybe non-nihilistic at a meta-level, and mostly pragmatic at story level