It may be informal and unofficial, generally lacks an owner and may "belong" to the society, and its telling may be an implicitly social activity.
[1] The term can refer to poems of an oral tradition that may date back many years;[2] that is, it is information that has been transmitted over time (between generations) only in spoken (and non-written) form.
[4] The definition can also be extended to include not just oral epics, but latrinalia, many forms of childlore (skipping-rope rhymes, the words of counting-out games etc.
[7] It is thought that epics such as The Iliad, and The Odyssey derive from, or are modeled on earlier folk-poetry forms.
These include Johann Gottfried Herder, Walter Scott, and Johan Ludvig Runeberg, and others.