works for an oral story, which is just a murmur of air, invisible and flexible. And since the art of oral story telling has, to a very large degree, been lost, we cannot even reconstruct such stories out of our own collective experience of telling and hearing them. Many historians believe that memory itself has changed with the shift to literacy – that we learn and remember things in a different way today from how we did in the past.
This is made more difficult still by a deep disagreement about the origins of fairy stories. As I discussed in the previous chapter, broadly similar themes and tropes emerge in stories from a number of highly disparate cultures, but the stories themselves are, so to speak, site specific. There are, basically, two schools of thought to account for the similarities: the first suggests that the stories deal with such fundamental human dilemmas, issues and problems that they arise spontaneously and independently in any given human culture. The other theory is that each of the stories is disseminated through telling, handed on from traveller to traveller, and that each new audience becomes a teller – a sort of anthropological ‘six degrees of separation’. To be honest, I don’t think either version really quite adds up, though I have no better theory to offer.
In fact, there is a good deal of disagreement about the emergence of any of the forms of expressing the imagination. Currently, anthropologists and social geographers suggest that all art began with ritual and arises initially out of a religious rather than an aesthetic response: the cave paintings of southern France or Central Eastern Africa (or anywhere else) were more fundamentally about hunting rituals than about interior decor. The idea, put too simply, is that first there was ritual, repeated ceremonies to placate, please or manipulate the gods. The life-and-death importance of these ceremonies made it crucial that they were practised correctly each time, and to make this simpler, rhythm developed – eventually supported by percussion instruments (usually some sort of drum) which punctuated the rituals and assisted their correct repetition. Rhythm developed into music. Both visual and narrative images came later – first, solid objects (sculpture), then representation (two-dimensional metaphors for three-dimensional realities); first, songs, then poetry, then stories.
As far as we can tell, oral tradition stories fell into three categories: myths, which dealt with religious matters; legends – heroic tales with some claim to historical truth; and fiction – stories that were not meant to be believed, at least at a surface or literal level, whether or not they revealed profound metaphorical truths of one kind or another. However, it is surprisingly hard to distinguish between the three.
It is, for example, impossible to know exactly how and in what way people understood the truth of some very ancient stories. Did the Hebrew people believe in Adam and Eve and the snake in the way that contemporary fundamentalists seem to? It seems unlikely: after the second chapter of Genesis, the name Adam occurs only twice in the whole Hebrew Scriptures, on both occasions in poetry, and both times meaning ‘humanity’, without any explicit moral message and no reference to the story itself. Eve is never mentioned at all, even in the laws and instructions enjoining obedience and submission on women. 16 Similarly, it is clear that many sophisticated Greeks and Romans did not believe in the myths or in the deities described by the myths, but still believed the stories were worth retelling, enjoying and referring to in a broader cultural way – as Ovid does in the Metamorphosis .
Because hagiography emerges in a similar cultural context and contains some surprisingly similar tropes to fairy stories, it is worth wondering exactly how medieval Christians understood these stories about saints. Some of the saints were clearly historical figures,
This is made more difficult still by a deep disagreement about the origins of fairy stories. As I discussed in the previous chapter, broadly similar themes and tropes emerge in stories from a number of highly disparate cultures, but the stories themselves are, so to speak, site specific. There are, basically, two schools of thought to account for the similarities: the first suggests that the stories deal with such fundamental human dilemmas, issues and problems that they arise spontaneously and independently in any given human culture. The other theory is that each of the stories is disseminated through telling, handed on from traveller to traveller, and that each new audience becomes a teller – a sort of anthropological ‘six degrees of separation’. To be honest, I don’t think either version really quite adds up, though I have no better theory to offer.
In fact, there is a good deal of disagreement about the emergence of any of the forms of expressing the imagination. Currently, anthropologists and social geographers suggest that all art began with ritual and arises initially out of a religious rather than an aesthetic response: the cave paintings of southern France or Central Eastern Africa (or anywhere else) were more fundamentally about hunting rituals than about interior decor. The idea, put too simply, is that first there was ritual, repeated ceremonies to placate, please or manipulate the gods. The life-and-death importance of these ceremonies made it crucial that they were practised correctly each time, and to make this simpler, rhythm developed – eventually supported by percussion instruments (usually some sort of drum) which punctuated the rituals and assisted their correct repetition. Rhythm developed into music. Both visual and narrative images came later – first, solid objects (sculpture), then representation (two-dimensional metaphors for three-dimensional realities); first, songs, then poetry, then stories.
As far as we can tell, oral tradition stories fell into three categories: myths, which dealt with religious matters; legends – heroic tales with some claim to historical truth; and fiction – stories that were not meant to be believed, at least at a surface or literal level, whether or not they revealed profound metaphorical truths of one kind or another. However, it is surprisingly hard to distinguish between the three.
It is, for example, impossible to know exactly how and in what way people understood the truth of some very ancient stories. Did the Hebrew people believe in Adam and Eve and the snake in the way that contemporary fundamentalists seem to? It seems unlikely: after the second chapter of Genesis, the name Adam occurs only twice in the whole Hebrew Scriptures, on both occasions in poetry, and both times meaning ‘humanity’, without any explicit moral message and no reference to the story itself. Eve is never mentioned at all, even in the laws and instructions enjoining obedience and submission on women. 16 Similarly, it is clear that many sophisticated Greeks and Romans did not believe in the myths or in the deities described by the myths, but still believed the stories were worth retelling, enjoying and referring to in a broader cultural way – as Ovid does in the Metamorphosis .
Because hagiography emerges in a similar cultural context and contains some surprisingly similar tropes to fairy stories, it is worth wondering exactly how medieval Christians understood these stories about saints. Some of the saints were clearly historical figures,
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