Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics, or embellishment. Every culture has its own narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation, or instilling moral values (sometimes through morals). Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot, characters, and narrative point of view. The term "storytelling" can refer specifically to oral storytelling but also broadly to techniques used in other media to unfold or disclose the narrative of a story.
Historical perspective
Storytelling, which is intertwined with the development of mythologies, predates written history. The first human languages had likely emerged by 80,000 BCE and were spoken or signed, or a combination of the two, but even the most basic languages allow the framing of hypotheticals, suggesting that the first language speakers could already tell stories. Stating a hypothetical, and telling a story about it may have provided a survival advantage to early human groups who developed it, creating an evolutionary pressure that favoured this cognitive development.
Storytelling often has a prominent educational and performative role in religious rituals (for example, the Passover Seder), and some archaeologists believe that rock art may have served as a form of storytelling for many ancient cultures, including the Aboriginal peoples of Australia.
The Aboriginal Australian people painted symbols which also appear in stories on cave walls as a means of helping the storyteller remember the story. The story was then told using a combination of oral narrative, music, rock art and dance, which brings understanding and meaning to human existence through the remembrance and enactment of stories.Cajete, Gregory, Donna Eder and Regina Holyan. Life Lessons through Storytelling: Children's Exploration of Ethics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. People have used the carved trunks of living trees and ephemeral media (such as sand and leaves) to record folktales in pictures or with writing. Complex forms of tattooing may also represent stories, with information about genealogy, affiliation and social status.Kaeppler, Adrienne. "Hawaiian tattoo: a conjunction of genealogy and aesthetics". Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformations of the Human Body. Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, UCLA (1988), APA.
Folktales often share common motifs and themes, suggesting possible basic psychological similarities across various human cultures. Other stories, notably fairy tales, appear to have spread from place to place, implying memetic appeal and popularity.
Groups of originally oral tales can coalesce over time into story cycles (like the Arabian Nights), cluster around mythic heroes (like King Arthur), and develop into the narratives of the deeds of the gods and saints of various religions. The results can be episodic (like the stories about Anansi), epic (as with Homeric tales), inspirational (note the tradition of vitae) and/or instructive (as in many Buddhist or Christian scriptures).
With the advent of writing and the use of stable, portable media, storytellers recorded, transcribed and continued to share stories over wide regions of the world. Stories have been carved, scratched, painted, printed or inked onto wood or bamboo, ivory and other bones, pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm-leaf books, skins (parchment), bark cloth, paper, silk, canvas and other textiles, recorded on film and stored electronically in digital form. Oral stories continue to be created, improvisationally by impromptu and professional storytellers, as well as committed to memory and passed from generation to generation, despite the increasing popularity of written and televised media in much of the world.
Contemporary storytelling
Modern storytelling has a broad purview. In addition to its traditional forms (fairytales, folktales, mythology, legends, fables etc.), it has extended itself to representing history, personal narrative, political commentary and evolving cultural norms. Contemporary storytelling is also widely used to address educational objectives.Birch, Carol and Melissa Heckler (Eds.) 1996. Who Says?: Essays on Pivotal Issues in Contemporary Storytelling Atlanta GA: August House New forms of media are creating new ways for people to record, express and consume stories.Ruediger Drischel, Anthology Storytelling - Storytelling in the Age of the Internet, New Technologies, Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved January 15, 2019 Tools for asynchronous group communication can provide an environment for individuals to reframe or recast individual stories into group stories. Games and other digital platforms, such as those used in interactive fiction or interactive storytelling, may be used to position the user as a character within a bigger world. Documentaries, including interactive web documentaries, employ storytelling narrative techniques to communicate information about their topic. Self-revelatory stories, created for their cathartic and therapeutic effect, are growing in their use and application, as in psychodrama, drama therapy and playback theatre. Storytelling is also used as a means by which to precipitate psychological and social change in the practice of transformative arts.
Some people also make a case for different narrative forms being classified as storytelling in the contemporary world. For example, digital storytelling, online and dice-and-paper-based role-playing games. In traditional role-playing games, storytelling is done by the person who controls the environment and the non-playing fictional characters, and moves the story elements along for the players as they interact with the storyteller. The game is advanced by mainly verbal interactions, with a dice roll determining random events in the fictional universe, where the players interact with each other and the storyteller. This type of game has many genres, such as sci-fi and fantasy, as well as alternate-reality worlds based on the current reality, but with different settings and beings such as werewolves, aliens, daemons, or hidden societies. These oral-based role-playing games were very popular in the 1990s among circles of youth in many countries before computer and console-based online MMORPG's took their place. Despite the prevalence of computer-based MMORPGs, the dice-and-paper RPG still has a dedicated following.
Oral traditions
Oral traditions of storytelling are found in several civilizations; they predate the printed and online press. Storytelling was used to explain natural phenomena, bards told stories of creation and developed a pantheon of gods and myths. Oral stories passed from one generation to the next and storytellers were regarded as healers, leaders, spiritual guides, teachers, cultural secrets keepers and entertainers. Oral storytelling came in various forms including songs, poetry, chants and dance.
Albert Bates Lord examined oral narratives from field transcripts of Yugoslav oral bards collected by Milman Parry in the 1930s, and the texts of epics such as the Odyssey.Lord, Albert Bates (2000). The singer of tales, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lord found that a large part of the stories consisted of text which was improvised during the telling process.
Lord identified two types of story vocabulary. The first he called "formulas": "Rosy-fingered Dawn", "Wine-dark Sea" and other specific set phrases had long been known of in Homer and other oral epics. Lord, however, discovered that across many story traditions, fully 90% of an oral epic is assembled from lines which are repeated verbatim or which use one-for-one word substitutions. In other words, oral stories are built out of set phrases which have been stockpiled from a lifetime of hearing and telling stories.
The other type of story vocabulary is theme, a set sequence of story actions that structure a tale. Just as the teller of tales proceeds line-by-line using formulas, so he proceeds from event-to-event using themes. One near-universal theme is repetition, as evidenced in Western folklore with the "rule of three": Three brothers set out, three attempts are made, three riddles are asked. A theme can be as simple as a specific set sequence describing the arming of a hero, starting with shirt and trousers and ending with headdress and weapons. A theme can be large enough to be a plot component. For example: a hero proposes a journey to a dangerous place / he disguises himself / his disguise fools everybody / except for a common person of little account (a crone, a tavern maid or a woodcutter) / who immediately recognizes him / the commoner becomes the hero's ally, showing unexpected resources of skill or initiative. A theme does not belong to a specific story, but may be found with minor variation in many different stories.
The story was described by Reynolds Price, when he wrote: A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens – second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.Price, Reynolds (1978). A Palpable God, New York:Atheneum, p.3.In contemporary life, people will seek to fill "story vacuums" with oral and written stories. "In the absence of a narrative, especially in an ambiguous and/or urgent situation, people will seek out and consume plausible stories like water in the desert. It is our innate nature to connect the dots. Once an explanatory narrative is adopted, it's extremely hard to undo," whether or not it is true.
Joseph Campbell In the mid-20th century, Joseph Campbell, studied many cultures around the world and discovered that structurally similar narrative patterns are present in oral myths across globally disparate cultures. In his book the "Hero's Journey," he argued that oral storytelling serves as a way to transmit universal human archetypes and cultural values across generations in the absence of written records. Rather than viewing oral tales as primitive historical artefacts, Campbell's framework treats the spoken story as a practical tool designed to guide individuals through major life transitions. Märchen and Sagen
Folklorists sometimes divide oral tales into two main groups: Märchen and Sagen.Storytellingday.net. "Oral Traditions In Storytelling ." Retrieved November 21, 2013. These are German terms for which there are no exact English equivalents, however we have approximations:
Märchen, loosely translated as "fairy tale(s)" or little stories, take place in a kind of separate "once-upon-a-time" world of nowhere-in-particular, at an indeterminate time in the past. They are clearly not intended to be understood as true. The stories are full of clearly defined incidents, and peopled by rather flat characters with little or no interior life. When the supernatural occurs, it is presented matter-of-factly, without surprise.
Sagen (translated as "legends") are traditionally understood within folkloristics as narratives grounded in real or believed-to-be-real events, typically anchored to a specific historical time and geographical location. Unlike traditional fairy tales (Märchen), where the fantastical is accepted without surprise, legends draw narrative tension from the emotional friction generated when the uncanny or supernatural intrudes into ordinary human reality. Common narrative subgenres within this category include ghost lore, Lover's Leap traditions, encounters with supernatural entities, and contemporary UFO abduction narratives.