Storytellers, communities, and storytelling traditions

As much as we like to cling to the notion, folktales were not "children's literature" until city people - parents or schoolteachers - decided that their children needed special storybooks. But in oral tradition, folktales were most typically told by adults, to adults. So the two contexts we saw in lecture 26.1 do not represent folktale-telling traditions over the centuries.

In Europe, narrators were "discovered" in the early 20th century, when audio recording equipment was invented, and that's when we get the first short, scratchy ethnographic recordings of a few voices. But adult community traditions of oral folktale telling were fading. When we read the written field notes of lucky folklorists who witnessed such events, we can only glimpse the richness of these traditions in the past.

Describing the "biology" of folktale traditions, as Linda Dégh called it, means describing how a text emerges from dynamic interaction between a storyteller, storytelling customs, and a storytelling community. This is kind of obvious, now that she noticed it: Even the most gifted storyteller will be silent if there is no community listening, or tradition of telling folktales in specific contexts. Every text must be interpreted in this context.

Reading

Please read a classic fieldwork report written by the Brothers Sokolov, describing their experiences in storytelling communities in the villages of Northwestern Russia in 1908-1909.

Then read a text Linda Dégh recorded in a Hungarian village in 1949, in a very similar situation: When Dégh sat down to make an audio recording of folktales told by the community's star storyteller Zsuzsanna Palko, the room filled up with an enthusiastic audience of adults. Your close reading of the text reveals how this storyteller adapted her most famous folktale to the community custom of telling folktales before funerals, during a wake that lasted the entire night.

Estimated time: 60 minutes

Boris & Yuri Sokolov, (1989). “In Search of Folktales and Songs,” in International Folkloristics. Edited by A.Dundes, pages 73-82.

UW Library : International Folkloristics

Zsuzsanna Palko, (1995) “I Don’t Know,” in Hungarian Folktales: The Art of Zsuzsanna Palko. Translated by Vera Kalm. Recorded, transcribed and edited by Linda Dégh. Garland, pages 3-34.

PDF File : AT_532_Palko_IDontKnow.pdf

Research Tool: Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Types of the Folktale. (Find Type 532)

Rationale: Encounter folktales as stories told by an adult to a community of adults. Practice "reading" as if you were an insider at the storytelling event, listening.

Lecture

In this lecture keep the following ideas in mind:

How do listeners - the "storytelling community" - affect the specific text that a storyteller tells?
How can the text of one folktale told by Zsuzsanna Palko help me become an effective folktale narrator?

Bonus

In the USA, folktale narrators were most dramatically "discovered" by the folklorist and literary author Zora Neale Hurston. Unfortunately, she did not have audio recording equipment, but her ethnographic descriptions of Black storytelling communities in Florida skillfully documented texts, textures and contexts. Here's a short excerpt from Hurston's 1935 book, Mules and Men, documenting one informal storytelling occasion: [pdf copy]

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