The
words seemingly came from a mental storehouse of phrases
and narrative devices accumulated over a lifetime. Lord
identified two types of story vocabulary. The first he called
formulas: rosy-fingered dawn, the wine-dark sea, certain
set phrases had long been known of from the books of Homer
and other oral epics. But no one realized before Lord how
common these formulas were. He discovered that across many
story traditions that fully 90% of an oral epic is assembled
from lines repeated verbatim or with one-for-one word substitutions.
Oral stories are built out of phrases stockpiled
from a lifetime of hearing and telling stories. The other
type of story vocabulary is theme. A theme is a set sequence
of story actions that structure the tale. Just as the teller
of tales proceeds line-by-line using formulas, so he proceeds
event-to-event using themes. One almost 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 heroes 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.
Themes may be no more than handy prefabricated
parts for constructing a tale. Or they may represent universal
truths - ritual-based, religious truths as James Frazer
saw in The Golden Bough, or archetypal, psychological truths
as Joseph Campbell describes in The Hero With a Thousand
Faces. The intrinsic nature of stories was described in
A Palpable God, by Reynolds Price (Akkadine Press) 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 days events to the vast incommunicable
constructs of psychopaths. There are many kinds of stories,
such as fables, parables, myths, legends. Stories are of
many moods, such as humorous, inspirational, didactic or
educative, frightening, tragic, romantic.
Folklorists sometimes divide oral tales
into two main groups: Märchen and Sagen. These are
German terms for which there are no exact English equivalents;
the first one is both singular and plural. (1) Märchen,
loosely translated as fairy tale(s) (though fairies are
rare in them) take place in a kind of separate once-upon-a-time
world of nowhere-in-particular. They are clearly not intended
to be understood as true
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