Meta Storytelling

Oral stories were absorbed into the mythologies of different places and cultures, and versions of them, now written down, followed the same tradition.

The ancient world gave no importance to authorship or ownership of stories and had no conception of copyright.

stories were told, retold, changed and revised according to the time, the place, the people and the circumstances. The concern was never whether events were factually true – they did not represent history; that was never their function.

specific stories survive because they hold an “ inner significance which is rarely glimpsed consciously, but which nevertheless acts powerfully upon our minds. ”

“The gift of story is wisdom”

― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling