Storytelling For The Modern Age
As long as man has been able to communicate, there have been stories
. Early man no doubt sat around the campfire regaling one another with tales of hunts and narrow escapes, and stories of animals for which they held particular reverence or respect.
Even before there were ways to record actual events through writing, cave paintings at such places as Lascaux in France show that man felt it important to express his observations of the world around him and to communicate with one another. But one thing led to another and as languages developed, so did methods of recording the words that conveyed meaning. Cuneiform and hieroglyphic writings enabled the recording of important events and tales, and as languages and writing evolved, man never neglected to set down on a variety of media the stories that stirred him.
Oral tradition occupied a prominent place and remained strong for millennia, but the writing down of happenings also grew and man looked for new ways to record the stories that captured his imagination. Natural mineral pigments and charcoal or chisels, applied to stone, gave way to plant dyes and secretions such as the ink emitted by the octopus, the colors of crushed beetles and even soot mixed with animal fat; these would preserve man's thoughts on papyrus and parchment and rice paper. Other substances, including the semiprecious stone lapis lazuli and even gold and silver, yielded up a richness that embellished the words man chose to immortalize.
Tales of ancient gods from the Greek and Roman pantheons to the deities of the Egyptians and the denizens of Asgard and the frozen North were preserved and passed down from generation to generation-some in writing and others by voice, in song and poetry and simple fireside tales. Stories of great heroes and warriors like Hercules and Odysseus, Beowulf and Hrothgar, Sigurd and the great kings of Tara, Arthur and Lancelot, Roland and El Cid fired the imagination and inspired courage and daring. Among the colorful players were sirens like Circe and sorceresses like Morgan le Fay and Viviane, who could bewitch men into shapes and deeds foreign to-or perhaps revealing of-their true natures.
Monsters like the Minotaur, Medusa and the Cyclops kept men awake at night, as did northern horrors like Grendel and villains like Mordred. Adventure beckoned not just from land but from the sky and even beneath the sea; rumors of great palaces in the sky and realms of mermaids who lured sailors to their deaths made men's blood run cold, even as the promise of adventure and the possibility of riches made them dream of far paradises filled with cascading fountains, stones that sparkled deep in the earth and cities paved with gold and pearls that lay beneath the waves.
To gold and silver on the page were added gold and silver strings as men sought to accompany such tales with music. Bards and skalds were joined as time passed by troubadours and trouveres, minstrels and wandering entertainers who could carry news as well as history from place to place along with the stories they spun from tradition. Explorers who traveled the world had always carried or sent back tales of the places they'd been and the wonders they'd seen, often providing bits and pieces of the stories they encountered on their journeys.
Other tales captured the imagination as well-vampires who rose from the dead to drink men's blood and men who turned into beasts in the light of the full moon joined the cavalcade of princes and princesses, witches and wizards and ordinary knights and peasants who populated tales such as those collected by the brothers Grimm, who mined oral tradition to preserve the tales that mesmerized village and countryside alike when the hour grew late and the wind howled among the trees.
Broadsheets and penny dreadfuls provided entertainment to an increasingly literate public, and running patterers in London provided news of the day to those who could not read it for themselves. Scholars and historians and educated gentlewomen set down everything from myths and legends to stories that could freeze the blood. In America the frontier and a wide variety of Indian nations, each with its own oral tradition, offered fresh inspiration, and soon stories featured heroes and outlaws of a different sort-or perhaps not so very different after all.
Books once made of parchment and lettered by hand had long since given way to paper and the printing press. Rice paper and rag paper would soon be joined by the ephemeral medium of pulp paper, and another storytelling tradition was born as eager and inspired writers spun yarns of everything from cowboys and range wars to journeys to the stars. Tales of the past were joined by tales of a future that could only be imagined, sometimes filled with wonders and sometimes with horrors-most probably a mix of both.
In the twenty-first century, stories first preserved on everything from papyrus to pulp are now available on electronic readers-without paper or ink, without pages to turn or heavy tomes to carry. Movies and comic books and graphic novels recount the adventures of gods and heroes and ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, surrounding us with transformed history and legend. And in a return to the storytellers of yesteryear, audiobooks on iPods tiny enough to fit in a shirt pocket enthrall modern audiences with stories that are part of both a written and an oral tradition, calling upon listeners' imaginations to depict a world that exists in a theater of the mind.
by: Lee Barwood
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