I'm totally confused as to what 'The Tradition' is.

Aren't we all? It's going to different for everyone, but for me its something to do with a body of finite material what has come down us from collectors that indicates that once upon a time things happened differently than they do today. I think of it as The Fossil Record. To me The Tradition exists as the Folk Song, Folk Music, Folk Tale, Folklore and Folk Custom of the oft rumoured Simpler Times and Cultures, the collected evidences of which indicate common morphology and fluidity across oceans, rivers, language barriers and other cultural boundaries. It is there in the Brothers Grimm, Absjorsen and Moe, Max Hunter, Cecil Sharp, the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, the Faber Book of Popular Verse and the note books of Annie Gilchrist. It is vast and diverse and quite possibly a figment of our imaginations, but at times it feels close enough to reach out and touch it (see my last post). Although long dead, it still feels weirdly alive to those who are that way inclined. I don't think of it as being merely Old Fashioned; we relate to far older things in everyday life - our number systems and our star signs for example, both of which predate anything in The Tradition by several thousand years - but The Tradition is such that it remains essentially timeless, however so remote, glimpsed on rare occasions as though through a glass darkly...