The Oral Tale
Oral poetry was not simply a way of telling lovely or important stories, or of flexing the imagination. It was, argues the classicist Eric Havelock, “a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment
... See moreJoshua Foer • Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
These deeds were memorialized by tribal storytellers, first in art, then in narrative. That has never stopped. The Hero’s Journey is locked into the psyche of humanity to this day.
Jeff Gomez • The Hero’s Journey is No Longer Serving Us
Stuart Evans added
In a culture reliant on oral traditions for preserving and mediating history, it would not be surprising if, two hundred years later, the trauma was still clearly embedded in stories—a terrifying vision of endings and beginnings that were also part of a longer cycle. After all, the preordination of fate, the inevitability of the Ragnarök, and the g
... See moreNeil Price • The Children of Ash and Elm
Until the last tick of history’s clock, cultural transmission meant oral transmission, and poetry, passed from mouth to ear, was the principle medium of moving information across space and from one generation to the next.
Joshua Foer • Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Oral stories were absorbed into the mythologies of different places and cultures, and versions of them, now written down, followed the same tradition.
Sally Mallam • Meta Storytelling
Claudia added
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.
Sally Mallam • Meta Storytelling
Claudia added
The intersection of oral and written storytelling happened first in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, about 2,500 years before Homer was first written down. Originally, scribes used this new technology only for bookkeeping, recording inventory, or for the equivalent of today’s text messages. But once the first scribes in Ur realized that writing ... See more
The Written Word
Claudia added
the wisest of storytellers, through imagery and the richness of their languages and through the multileveled structure of their stories, provide a beacon for those open to a new understanding of humanity’s evolutionary process and who might hope to see themselves as part of that transformation.
Sally Mallam • The Science of Storytelling
Claudia added