telling a tale

[marycatelli]

Sometimes characters have to tell stories.

Not, mind you, tales of their own adventures.  Those can usually be tossed off in a line of summary, if not omitted entirely (presumed to be off-stage), and even when needed -- as J. R. R. Tolkien needed Legolas and Gimli to tell of the Paths of the Dead, because the alternative was remove surprise or go backwards in time -- it's all part of the plot.  Sometimes, on the other hand, they have to tell other tales.

In my stories, it tends to be fairy tales.

Reading a lot of them does give you the advantage that you don't have to grab one of the handful of well-known ones.  Both for the novelty factor and to actually have something that resonates with the theme, and keeps the story from falling into parts.  You could invent your own, but there's always the danger of circling 'round the same motifs -- and besides, many are unconvincing as fairy tales -- at least to me after reading so many. . .

But even after reading hundreds, it can be interesting to track down the exact one that reflects father-and-son animosity, or that features something being turned into a man from the inanimate.

And then you have to decide whether the character will be allowed to tell it all, and how much goes in summary, and how well the character tells it -- the Grimms, and most other collections offered to the general reading population, clean up the tales quite a bit if only to make the story better structured.

Stuff to wrestle with.

Comments

[michal wojcik (from livejournal.com)]

Or you could take well-known tales and spice them up into something nearly unrecognisable as another possibility. Gene Wolfe did that in some sections of The Book of the New Sun...though in that case, it clearly was the far future and the stories had been altered over the intervening years. The prevalence of similar motifs cross-culturally means it wouldn't be particularly unconvincing to do the same in a fantasy novel as long as human societies are involved. As societies are partly defined by their shared storehouse of narratives it can also add a certain authenticity to a made-up culture (Tolkien understood this very well, thus all those "useless" songs and stories sprinkled throughout).

[marycatelli]

OTOH, one could also rip off a variant of the well-known tales, which often gets them nearly unrecognizable without the bother of spicing them up. Tattercoats for instance.

[michal wojcik (from livejournal.com)]

Oh yes, simply going back to Straparola or the French Salon Tales or Perrault will give you earlier versions of well-known fairy tales that are so far removed from the Grimm versions they may as well be different stories entirely. (I believe the entire text of Straparola's Facetious Nights is up on Sur la Lune as well)

Also, the Husain Haddawy translation of The Arabian Nights, from a 14th c. Syrian manuscript, is filled with lesser-known entries in that story cycle, some of which, uncoincidently, have a striking resemblance to later European fairy tales (you could say this was shared both ways, since Sinbad the Sailor is an obvious retelling of The Odyssey, but with a suitably different main character!)

[marycatelli]

Humm -- well, some of Perrault's are in fact the better known. We know Cinderella, not Aschenputtel. "What Perrault began, the Grimms completed" as Joseph Jacobs put it -- and even though his works are more recent, they have many unusual tales. Facetious Nights does have unusual ones, but then, so does Italian Popular Tales . And Asbjørnsen and Moe.