Fortunately, /u/Miles_Sine_Castrum addresses much of what is needed here. There has been a lot of attempts to "back in" to storytelling during the early medieval period - and none of them are without controversy. Many are convinced that it is possible to hear the voice of an oral narrator - a storyteller in a hall - when one reads the Beowulf text, for example. Folklorists are convinced that when we see a collection of motifs in a primary source, which also appear together in other primary sources, and then are echoed in folklore collections in the nineteenth century, that this is evidence of an oral tradition passing through time. The argument maintains that these motifs could not have coincidentally appeared together in these diverse sources and then in nineteenth-century collections without existing in the oral tradition. Not all agree with this argument. But I do!

In the specific example of Beowulf, scholars have identified it having been influenced by the Bear's Son folktale, Aarne-Thompson-Uther Tale Type 301. It is a widespread folktale, and there are what is known as "analogues" in Icelandic and other medieval literature. What this hints at is a body of oral narratives that various authors picked up. That process of "picking up" obviously affected the original material more or less - and probably it did so "more", but that doesn't negate the hint that can be perceived of an oral source.

There can be little question that storytelling occurred in the early medieval period since storytelling is something that people do, and it appears to be universal or nearly so. In addition, the interplay between literature and oral narrative reaches back millennia - apparently affecting sources as diverse as Gilgamesh, Homeric poems, and the bible, so it would be surprising if the process of borrowing from oral narrative did not occur in the early medieval period.

Storytelling is a topic that dominates a forthcoming book of mine, so there are a lot of angles we can take with this. I will follow this with an additional note on sources and other thoughts that may help you.

Every time I try to look at the dark ages specifically, I end up looking at some site classifying it as medieval and all the stories seem to fall under the middle ages category instead..

Ok, there seems to be some sort of misconception here. The 'dark ages' are the middle ages; to be more precise, the 'dark ages' is an old, out-dated and discredited label for the early middle ages, the period roughly from the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the fifth century AD up to around the year 1000. Pretty much noone uses the term anymore (because it, inaccurately, conjures up the idea that the period was somehow backwards and ignorant of its own past) - it's either called the early Middle Ages or it's just lumped in with, as you've found, the rest of the middle ages.

As for the rest of your question - there's not a huge amount of evidence for what would nowadays be defined as folklore from the early middle ages, due to the lack of survival of a written evidence for a primarily oral mode of storytelling. The earliest examples of that kind of thing are the French vernacular fabliaux - rauncy, down-to-earth moralistic tales which begin to be written down in the twelfth century. Similar traditions exist in other European vernaculars, but tend to be written down later.

The other option is to look at some saint's lives and miracle stories. This genre (known as hagiography) doesn't really tend to get lumped in with folklore because it's religious material from a still-living religion, unlike religious material from dead religions, which gets lumped in as mythology (for which, from early medieval origins, see also the Scandinavian/Norse mythological tradition). However, medieval hagiography often has its roots in folk-legends and traditions about local holy figures and is an absolutely valid comparison in a project focused on storytelling.

Hope this helps, and best of luck with the project.

Part 2 on my comments:

In my forthcoming book, The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation, I argue that the Cornish droll tellers can be considered within context of studies dealing with European storytelling - chief among these being the work in Ireland. The following excerpt is before the good work of the copy editor can make me seem far smarter than I am, so take it for what it is worth, but you can cite this (with the link provided) and in so doing you will be citing a book that has yet to be released! Best wishes, and feel free to ask additional questions. Here are some paragraphs that may help:

Many societies feature specialists who rise above most active bearers of tradition. These skilled narrators graduate to the next level by winning acclaim and sometimes becoming professional storytellers. In 1945, James Delargy (Séamus Ó Duilearga; 1899-1980), the founding director of the Irish Folklore Commission, presented a classic study of the seanchaithe, the storytellers of Ireland. His essay went a long way toward documenting the expert keepers of tradition who roamed the countryside, telling stories in exchange for room and board. Delargy was pathfinding; folklorists regard his eloquent work as the definitive early discussion about those who conveyed popular stories from one generation to the next.(fn 1)

A subsequent encyclopaedic study by Georges Denis Zimmermann is a twenty-first-century benchmark analysis of the Irish storyteller. He draws on evidence from early material as well as from the later period of classic folklore collection in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With this information, he constructs an elaborate portrait of those who told the stories. The insights of Delargy stand, but Zimmermann adds a comprehensive review of sources.(fn 2) ...

Delargy praised the conservatism of the Irish storyteller, suggesting that the craft,

'Attained a very high degree of perfection in medieval times to judge from the detritus of the epic literature of the manuscript tradition which has come down to us from the eighth century. But the written saga is but a pale ghost of the tale that once was told, and the personality and polished artistry of the medieval story-teller can only be guessed at by the student of the written word who has not had the privilege of hearing the living voice of the modern reciter of Irish wonder-tales, the democratic descendant of the aristocratic story-teller of a thousand years ago.' (fn 3)

He further suggested that there was ‘remarkable continuity of tradition linking the living oral literature of the Gaelic West… with that of the manuscript tradition in an unbroken chain of over 1,200 years.’ (fn 4) ...

Delargy must be given his due. After all, he collected so much and dealt directly with the sort of travelling storytellers who vanished decades ago. Nevertheless, there is room to question his objectivity. At times, he seemed to struggle with the seeming contradiction between portraying the Irish storyteller as a conservative voice of the past and as a creative, inventive artist. Delargy’s idealistic view of Irish folklore is justified, at least to a certain extent. Every indication was that its storytellers prided themselves in the preservation of the story.

On the other hand, at times it seems Delargy’s romanticism led him to overemphasize the conservatisms of his nation’s storytelling. He wanted to see Irish folktales as remnants of a distant past, as expressions of what Kenneth Jackson referred to as ‘a window to the Iron Age’. (fn 5) Any culture’s storytelling probably represents a spectrum that includes conservatism on one hand and creativity on the other, and most Irish storytellers likely resided at the end that preserved more of what was heard. That said, their process may not have been as strict as Delargy maintained.

Zimmermann includes a detailed discussion of the role and limits of memorisation when it came to the transmission of longer stories. He points out that there is no good evidence that people could repeat, word for word, long stories they had heard. Instead, an experienced storyteller understood the structure of the genre and could adopt a story for his or her repertoire by breaking the story into its essential elements. By relying on the established rules that governed the nature of oral tradition, a storyteller faced a less daunting task when it came to ‘memorizing’ something recently heard. The degree to which someone could or would take pride in the alleged exact repetition of a folktale depended on individual ability and interest but also on cultural preferences. Many in Ireland wanted to believe their folktales preserved an ancient inheritance, and this affected the storyteller, the audience, and the collector’s perception. The degree to which a storyteller maintained a legacy from past generations can be questioned, but clearly pre-modern Ireland idealised conservatism when it came to the telling of stories.(fn 6)

1 James H. Delargy (Séamus Ó Duilearga), ‘The Gaelic Story-Teller with some notes on Gaelic Folk-Tales’ (The Sir John Rhŷs Lecture, presented 28 November 1945; published 1946); and see his ‘The Gaelic Story-Teller – No Living Counterpart in Western Christendom’, Ireland of the Welcomes, 1:1 (1952) 2-4. Delargy was the long-standing director of the Irish Folklore Commission. Dundes reproduced his original article in International Folkloristics, 153-76; references to Delargy’s article employ page numbers from this edition. Dundes, 157, further recommends additional sources to be considered in the context of storytellers: Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island, translated by Bryan MacMahon (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1974; originally published in Gaelic in 1938) and her sequel, An Old Woman’s Reflections, translated by Séamus Ennis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); and Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). Gun Herranen provides an example of a Finnish-Swedish storyteller, Berndt Strömberg (1822-1910), discussing the creativity of the tradition bearer. Herranen’s article, ‘The Storyteller’s Repertoire’, appears in Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf, editors, Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989) 63-69.

2 George Denis Zimmermann, The Irish Storyteller (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001).

3 Delargy, ‘The Gaelic Story-Teller’, 159.

4 Delargy, ‘The Gaelic Story-Teller’, 158.

5 Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, The Oldest Irish Tradition: A Window on the Iron Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

I take it from the "Western Civ" component that you're more interested in Europe? Because there's quite a lot on pre-Islamic poetry that might be of interest on this topic in re the "Dark Ages."