Yet despite (or more likely because of) this lively and sophisticated multiformity, the Yugoslav bard would always claim to be faithful to his source, namely, to the traditional form of his tale. As Lord says, “His idea of stability, to which he is deeply devoted, does not include the wording, which to him has never been fixed, nor the unessential parts of the story. He builds his performance… on the stable skeleton of narrative.” The traditional narrator holds firm to the belief that the story must be passed on undiminished. This commitment to the idea of the story’s integrity is affirmed by the contemporary Scottish storyteller Duncan Williamson: “You may think it strange that I don’t make up any stories. I couldn’t, suppose you paid me for it. I can make up a song of the present day but it’s just not within me to make up a story. I wouldn’t believe it!” Williamson’s book is titled The Broonie, Silkies, and Fairies. “For this ye knowen al so wel as I,” writes Chaucer for his still-oral audience, before recounting the tales of the Canterbury pilgrims:
Whoso shal telle a tale after a man
He moot reherce [as near] as ny as evere he kan
Everich a word, if it be in his charge,
Al speke he never so rudeliche [rudely] and large
Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe,
Or feyne [feign, pretend] thing, or fynde wordes newe.
That is, the storyteller must retell every word as closely as he can, or else he’s just fabricating the whole thing. And Lord again: “If the singer [or storyteller] changes what he has heard in its essence, he falsifies truth.”
Devotion, belief, truth, falsehood—it’s clear that more is at stake than mere telling styles. Let me take these ideas from the world of the bards back to 398.2, my world of books. As I search for a story to make my own, I read a host of translations, adaptations, transcriptions; and I’m faced with the problem of choosing (or sometimes reworking) one version above the rest. How can one decide which author or editor does the best justice to a story’s stable skeleton of narrative when you meet its multiforms in print?
Take “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” You can find many versions of this story in the library. I’ll use two of them as my examples; both are by contemporary writers who have adapted their stories from previously published English translations.
The authors, Laurence Housman and Geraldine McCaughrean, agree on the main sequence of events, but they differ on what happened in Ali Baba’s courtyard on a certain dark and dangerous Arabian night. Here is the background: A travelling oil merchant has begged Ali Baba to put him up for the night. He is none other than the notorious chief of the robbers, come with his men to wreak a bloody vengeance on the man who discovered their secret treasure cave. After the false villain goes to bed, Ali Baba’s servant girl Marjanah goes out to borrow a measure of oil from one of the jars. She discovers that they contain not oil but thirty-seven robbers (there used to be forty, but two have already been executed by their colleagues, and the chief is asleep in the house). Finding one jar with real oil and knowing any alarm would be futile, the resourceful Marjanah fills a cauldron with oil from the genuine jar and boils it in the kitchen. She returns to the courtyard and, in Housman’s spare telling, pours into each jar “a sufficient quantity of the boiling oil to scald its occupant to death.”
This is the customary way of recounting the scene, dating back to the story’s appearance in Antoine Galland’s French collection of 1704. Marjanah’s actions are extreme, cruel, efficient—but one must not forget that these men were no cupcakes. They were crouching in the empty jars with drawn daggers, awaiting their chief’s signal to commence their bloody attack.
In her version of the story, McCaughrean tells the scene differently. On finding the hidden robbers (here numbering thirty-nine, the two executions having been deleted), Marjanah “fetched a large cream cheese from the kitchen and stopped up the breathing holes in all the thirty-nine jars which spoke.”
It is a small detail in a long and complex story, this substitution of cream cheese for boiling oil as Marjanah’s instrument of retribution. McCaughrean doesn’t explain why she makes the change. One can only wonder if a squeamish editor suggested that today’s readers would find the traditional method of robber elimination too violent, and that death-by-dairy-product is somehow more humane and palatable.
Even though it seems like a small change, it affects the deepest patterns of the story. Marjanah becomes for that moment not a strong, courageous, smart heroine, but a character in a cartoon. The scene becomes self-consciously ludicrous. Oil might have done the trick, but you will never get me to believe that a big, mean robber would simply wilt into oblivion under a suffocating mass of cheese. Unless, that is, the author wants me to think the whole thing’s just a joke. But I don’t want to laugh at Marjanah, I’m drawn to her adventurous charm. I like her fierce and implacable. She reminds me of other characters in Story—Odysseus, Anansi, Brer Rabbit, Coyote, the English Molly Whuppie, even Hodja Nasrudin. She is cut from the same cloth. Like all tricksters in oral literature, Marjanah prefers to turn evil against itself, using her enemy’s strength to destroy him. Earlier in the tale, on finding a strange mark on her door, she marks all the doors on the street in the same way, thus turning the thieves’ sign into her own best camouflage. Here in the courtyard it makes perfect trickster sense to kill the robbers with the very oil they have displaced.
By giving Marjanah a silly, implausible deed to perform, this teller makes her less heroic, less consistent within her own story, and therefore less connected to her trickster colleagues throughout oral tradition. Even such a small detail as how to get rid of a gang of robbers turns out to be part of the story’s “stable skeleton of narrative.” I do not choose to tell this version.
Another collector, Ethel Phelps, wrote in the introduction to her book of stories, The Maid of the North: “In giving the older tales of our heritage a fresh retelling for this generation of readers, I have exercised the traditional storyteller’s privilege. I have shaped each tale, sometimes adding or omitting details, to reflect my sense of what makes it a satisfying tale.” A small alarm bell went off when I read this: it sounds like a “privilege” or prerogative no traditional teller would ever claim, let alone publicize. They would make the quite different assertion that they are faithfully passing along the story exactly as it had been given to them. Phelps describes her version of the Russian wonder tale “Maria Morevna” as being “compressed to make a smoother flow of narrative.” It is worth comparing Phelps’s telling to the older version collected by the great Russian folklorist Afanas’ev, which I read in a translation by Norbert Guterman.
In Afanas’ev, the story begins with the dying wishes of an old Tsar and Tsarevna. They summon their four children—the princesses Olga, Anna, and Maria, and Prince Ivan—and they ask Ivan to be sure his sisters find good husbands. When the parents die, this rather patriarchal premise is immediately put to the test: three supernatural suitors come courting—Falcon, Eagle and Raven. They ask Ivan to give his sisters as brides. Ivan refuses to exercise the authority his parents seemed to confer on him, and which the bird-knights expect him to possess. He avers that he cannot choose on behalf of his sisters. The three sisters choose on their own to depart with their respective bridegrooms, and Prince Ivan is left alone.
Later, Ivan sets off to visit his sisters, and comes to the battle camp of the warrior queen Maria Morevna. Maria Morevna has just slain an entire army of male soldiers. When Prince Ivan shows up in front of her tent she greets him with a curious challenge: “Hail, prince. Whither is God taking you? And is it of your own will or by compulsion?” To which the young seeker responds, “Brave knights do not travel by compulsion”—which is surely the proper heroic answer to give a beautiful warrior queen, even though our young hero is about to spend the rest of the story discovering that brave men and women travel both by compulsion and according to their freely chosen destinies. Maria Morevna replies in her matter-of-fact style, “Well, if you are not in a hurry, rest
in my tents,” and so makes her own free choice of Ivan as her lover.
Before the Afanas’ev version allows Ivan to reach intimacy, he has been made to pass a sequence of tests. He is shown refusing to exercise power over women, although it is expected of him, and the consequence of his refusal is to find himself sisterless and alone. He is shown in the roles of a son, a brother, a man who doesn’t force his will on women, a man connected through his sisters to supernatural beings, and a seeker on his own behalf. All of this qualifies him for his encounter with his mate-to-be.
In the Phelps version this complex prologue is missing. As she tells it the story begins with Maria Morevna’s succession to her father’s throne:
She had inherited her kingdom from her father, and her father, very wisely, had trained her not only to govern well, but also to defend the kingdom against enemy armies. Many princes sought to marry her, thinking to gain control of the country. Maria Morevna refused them all. One day the young Prince Alexey rode in from the south and said he wished to serve in the army of Maria Morevna. The long and the short of it was—they fell in love, and the marriage took place three months later at the palace…
I notice small changes first. Maria Morevna is portrayed here not as a full-blown warrior queen but as the product of her father’s training. Phelps doesn’t let her choose the boy (“they” fall in love), nor does she let them hop into her tent tout de suite; she interpolates a more decorous period of three months.
The big change here is that she truncates the prince’s rite of passage. In Phelps, Prince Alexey simply rides in “from the south.” He has no history. He does not earn the right to his intimacy with so formidable a heroine as Maria Morevna. Because the prince has made fewer and less significant choices, Maria Morevna’s choice of him as her husband seems also diminished and trivial.
Later in both tellings of the story, the prince is put to the ultimate test. In Phelps and Afanas’ev, Maria Morevna is abducted by her erstwhile prisoner, Koschey the Deathless Wizard (who was liberated from her dungeon by none other than her own unsuspecting, kindhearted husband, Ivan/Alexey). The prince rides forth to find her again, but Koschey proves to be a most dangerous foe. In the Afanas’ev version, he kills Prince Ivan on his third attempt to win back Maria Morevna: “Koschey galloped off, overtook Prince Ivan, cut him into tiny pieces, and put the pieces in a tarred barrel, reinforced it with iron hoops, threw it into the blue sea, and carried Maria Morevna off to his house.” Having read my way through 398.2, I’m not worried about the difficult straits the pieces of our hero find themselves in. Death is only a temporary obstacle in a wonder tale, and Ivan is, after all, connected to those powerful brothers-in-law. Earlier in the story Ivan had found his sisters again, and left with them silver tokens to remember him by. At the moment of his death these tokens turn black. Falcon, Raven and Eagle fly forth to rescue and restore the young hero, literally remembering him with their magic powers, and so making possible his continued search for Maria Morevna.
In Phelps, because her prince has no history before marrying Maria Morevna, he has neither sisters nor supernatural helpers to come to him in his moment of need. Three unusual, pattern-breaking things happen in her telling of this scene. The first is that Prince Alexey does not die. He begs for his life and is spared: “As the wizard swung his sword high, Alexey cried out, ‘When I gave you the third jar of water you promised me my life!’ The sword stopped in midair. ‘Very well,’ snarled the wizard. ‘I will not kill you.’ And he gave orders for Alexey to be put into a large cask…” I find these are strange things for a hero and an evil wizard to do. Fairytale heroes and heroines don’t often beg for their lives. In fact, in the whole Folk and Fairy Tales section of the library, this is the only case I’ve ever come across. It is simply not done. Oral tradition likes its heroes courageous, uncalculating, spontaneously generous and, most of all, ready to die for their deeply held beliefs. Prince Alexey, by putting a value on his own life, by showing himself unwilling to die for his love, by having second thoughts about the whole affair, is just plain craven by the standards of traditional wonder tales. Phelps has broken the pattern that connects her prince to the other passionate and noble seekers, warriors and lovers of oral literature. As for Koschey, there, too, the pattern falters. No evil ogre, wizard or bad guy in 398.2 has ever spared his enemy’s life, no matter how hard they begged.
The prince still winds up inside the cask, however, and this leaves Phelps with the problem of narrating him out of it. This is the third and strangest moment of all. Her Prince Alexey has no organic and familial link with the world of magic. Who will extricate him from the barrel? As she tells it, “Now, it happened the next day that a hawk, an eagle, and a crow, seeing the cask floating in the sea, became curious and pulled it to shore.” In 398.2, magic never “happens” to happen. Magical beings, or even a trio of birds, do not simply float across the scenery looking for heroes to rescue. Though these are called wonder tales, the “wonder” appears sparingly and always with strong reason. If beings with supernatural power do appear, however suddenly and unexpectedly (a magical wolf, a horse of power), they stick around long enough to turn into real characters, not simply to serve as creaky deus ex machina. Magic is more than a device to advance the plot, or peel open a barrel.
In making what she claims is a “smoother flow of narrative,” this writer has muffled the story’s voice and reduced its range of expression. Her prince is less heroic, her heroine less compelling for choosing such an inconsequential, unmagical man. As for Falcon, Eagle and Raven, they are cut off from their magical roots, deprived of their mysterious and magnificent power.
And who are these strange creatures, these bird-men who flash down in a thunderburst to court Prince Ivan’s sisters? They initiate the hero’s journey towards desire and intimacy; they console and succour him along the way; and they restore him when the enemy of love has shattered and destroyed him. Who are they?
I was telling the story of “Maria Morevna”—the Afanas’ev version—to Ron Evans (my Metis storm-fool friend) one night. He grew up in the Chippewa—Cree tradition of northern Saskatchewan, and he smiled as he listened to the story. Afterwards he said, “We tell stories about them, too. We call them the Thunder Beings, and they’re always trying to find earthly men and women to marry. They are very powerful spirits.”
How did Cree Thunder Beings find their way to the sky above Prince Ivan’s Russian palace? Does the same sky of wonder and possibility vault over all heroic destinies? Does the search for intimacy always commence with a thunderous, roof-cracking intervention, connecting us to the mysterious forces that smash and remake the everyday world? There is no answer to these questions, at least none as entertaining as the questions themselves. What I gather from this play of stories is that, unless the pattern is given in all its details, unless the teller passes along as much as he or she has been given, the story cannot evoke its fullest range of response.
The next time you visit the library looking for stories to learn by heart, keep an ear out for thunder. That rumbling sound above your head may be the Thunderbird reminding you that when you put a traditional story together, you should put all the bones in the right places.
OLD PATTERNS, NEW YARNS
A story is not good unless you add something to it.
Tuscan proverb
STORYTELLING IS A CREATIVE ART. Working with old patterns, storytellers are free to use new yarns, so long as we don’t damage or diminish the tale in the reworking. Many traditional storytellers I’ve known might well disagree. They would say that originality is vastly overrated, their artistic practice and purpose being to serve and preserve a narrative inheritance. But for storytellers who are part of the contemporary renaissance, invention and experimentation are essential ways to rediscover the art. And even among traditional storytellers, despite their claims of fidelity, they never treat their stories as museum pieces to be kept safe and carefully handled. Traditional storytellers often have a great ability to respo
nd to the moment, to include the audience, to make up new details as the story requires; that is, to play with the material.
Robert Munsch, a Canadian children’s writer, gives a good example (I included it in my book Tales for an Unknown City) of how a new audience made him find something new in his own story. He was travelling in the far north and he tried telling his story “The Mud Puddle” to an audience of Inuit children. The story, which has become practically a folk tale among North American children, is about a girl who is repeatedly assailed by a mud puddle in her backyard, despite the best efforts of her mother to keep her clean and out of trouble. The story, he claims, had never failed to grab any audience of kids. Up north, nobody laughed. “It was a dud,” he reports. At the end of the story, he realized what was going on: “When I was done a kid put up his hand and asked, ‘What’s a mud puddle?’” The ground in Inuktitut had never been warm enough to turn into mud. The kids had never seen it, and had no idea why mud puddles could behave so capriciously and unsanitarily. Munsch turned the mud puddle into a snowdrift and the Inuit kids now found it hilarious.
Sometimes the originality lies in recognizing a new use or context for a traditional story. Angela Sidney’s son left the Yukon to join the Canadian army and fight in the Second World War. He was gone for five years. When the war ended he sent a telegram from Europe to the Yukon. As Julie Cruikshank writes in Life Lived Like a Story, “She began planning his homecoming at once, estimating the number of days it would take for him to travel across the Atlantic by boat, across Canada by train, up the west coast of the country by boat, and inland to the Yukon on the narrow-gauge White Pass and Yukon Railway. She arranged a party to welcome him and as a special gift she gave him the song of Kaax’achgook…” The song comes from a Tlingit story given to Angela Sidney’s clan by another Crow clan. It is the story of a man who is lost at sea. He is able to return from the island on which he is shipwrecked by calculating the position of the sun at the summer’s solstice. In Angela Sidney’s words:
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