Deeper Look

Say It Like You Mean It: The Ancient Tradition of Storytelling By Ian Chant

Children and adults gathered for storytime in a New York City park, circa 1910

Over time, the simplest things tend to be the ones that survive. Nowhere is this fact more clear than in the case of storytelling. Across cultures, across ages, across any demographic you care to name, we began as storytellers, and we continue to be storytellers in one form or another to this day. Whether we find ourselves around a campfire or around the water cooler, on a first date or tucking the kids in for the night, the oral tradition of sharing a tale is so ingrained in us that most of us take it for granted.

But the power of our words should give us pause for thought. After thousands of years and countless technological innovations, simply telling a story you've told or heard a hundred times before—an urban legend, a nursery rhyme, or an apocryphal piece of family history—remains as relatable as it was millennia ago.

In ancient Greece, the birthplace of the story related in An Iliad, few citizens could read, but almost all knew the myths and legends that had been passed down from their ancestors. These stories were told again and again because they meant something important. They were religious fables, ancient histories, myths, and morality tales, many so old that fact and fantasy were indiscernible and inextricable. They were told to entertain audiences and to remind listeners of the values of their society. They were told to celebrate in good times and to distract in bad. They were told in thousands of voices for thousands of years, and as they transformed those who told them, those who listened to them were themselves inevitably transformed.

This is because the oral tradition, unlike writing, leaves a little freedom for the storyteller, a little wiggle room in the tale. When a story is put to paper, as Homer eventually did with his version of the Trojan War story in An Iliad, it becomes concrete and unchangeable. But prior to this, the tales of The Iliad were stories like any other, passed down through generation after generation. They were stories that changed continually, remaining dynamic over the ages. They were stories that were alive, that continued to evolve and reflect the character and style of each successive generation.

This is the part of the unique charm of tales passed down through storytelling. Over the years, details change and stories are transformed. Like the fish that got away, aspects of the story become magnified. Figures become larger than life, and the tasks they set themselves to become earth-shaking.

The oral tradition also represents one of the earliest types of performance. In creating the tales that had been passed down to them through generations, storytellers often had to take on many roles, attempting to be all things to all people in their audience. Each tale thus became unique not only in content, but in the way it was told.

It's a testament to the story of The Iliad that we are still telling the tale today. But it is just as remarkable that we are still telling it in much the same way. Our lighting is better, certainly, and our scripts more thoroughly edited, but the core of the thing remains the same-one person, holding an audience rapt with his voice, his manner, using only his words and the belief of his audience to create epic journeys, terrible battles, whole worlds for us to inhabit. Of all the ways we now know how to tell a story, this remains among the finest.