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Phaedrus and Folklore: an Old Problem Restated1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
There was once a man in a certain village in the mountains, who made his living by making up stories, which he used to tell to the people of his village to while away their evenings. One day he went on a journey to a strange village far away in the plains, and there he saw a group of men sitting round another story-teller. Being curious to learn whether his rival was as good a story-teller as he was, he joined the group and listened. He was astonished to find that the story being told was one he had made up himself. So when the story-teller had finished, the man took him aside and said, ‘That was a good story, but it is my story, which I made up, and you must pay me money for it.’ ‘You are wrong,’ said his rival. ‘It is my story, for I made it up myself this morning’.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1979
References
2 Ben-Amos, D. and Goldstein, K.S., ‘Folklore, performance and communication’, Approaches to Semiotics (1975), p. 5Google Scholar, cit. Henderson, op. cit., n. 70.
3 Dawkins, R.M., Modern Greek folktales (1953), p. xxii.Google Scholar
4 Cf. J. Bédier, loc. cit. Henderson, op. cit., n. 16.
5 Op. cit., p.24Google Scholar, after Ben-Amos, , Folklore genres, p. 217, cit. Henderson, op. cit., n. 65.Google Scholar
6 See Colby, B. and Cole, M., ‘Culture, memory and narrative’, in Modes of Thought (1973), pp. 82–3, ed. R. Houghton and R. Finnegan.Google Scholar
7 Let us suppose that there were runes on the Venetian lions from the Piraeus (cf. Miller, W., Essays on the Latin Orient, 1921 [1964], 48–9Google Scholar; the ‘runes’ are disputed, and now obliterated, but the argument is not affected). This would be inexplicable, save for the fact that Harold Hardrada and some troops of his were in the Imperial Guard at Constantinople in 1040. The runes may be fiction, but the conduit is there, or nearly all the way there, and we know of it only by accident.
8 Tinbergen, N., A Study of Instinct (1951) is a classic in this branch of science. Bird-song is also an interesting example of inherited ‘language’; the pattern seems to be encoded, but it is subject to individual variation.Google Scholar
9 Jean Piaget and Roman Jakobson were pioneers in this field. The latter's findings, in particular, formed the empirical basis for Noam Chomsky's far-reaching theories about the fundamental structures of language.
10 Henderson justly criticizes Stith Thompson, 's Motif-Index of Folkliterature (1955–1958)Google Scholar for its unhelpful categories, but this does not invalidate its approach.