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A real culture, we know, is all of a piece and all its parts fit together. Household stories imply work done in a household and work done in a household implies household stories. In western Ireland today a loom or a spinning-wheel is a sign that one can find a traditional storyteller in the cottage or in the neighborhood. The present writer has heard from his elders that in times when the girls of the neighborhood came to a cottage to do the spinning a storyteller was fetched to entertain them. Men and women coming in from factories would not be entertained by household stories but people who worked in the house would. The prolongation of light, the introduction of books and newspapers, the cessation of the household arts all went together to make an end of traditional stories in European cottages.

There were other reasons. A widespread language took the place of dialects and the language of the traditional stories became obscure. The meaning of the stories could only be put baldy into the widespread language; the current language was not traditional enough to relate the traditions in. In High German, the Brothers Grimm noted, a story gained in clearness (that is, clearness for the reader), but it “lost in flavor, and no longer had such a firm hold of the kernel of the thing signified.” They were wise enough not to put all their collection in High German; frequently they retained the dialect of the district where they heard the stories.

Today we can hear traditional stories but in very out-of-the-way parts of Europe. A writer who lived in such places gives us a sense of distance from the modern world when he puts a storytelling session before us. “He is so blind that I can gaze at him without discourtesy, and after a while the expression of his face made me forget to listen.… The glow of childish transport that came over him when he reached the nonsense ending—so common in these tales—recalled me to myself, and I listened attentively while he gabbled with delighted haste: “They found the path and I found the puddle. They were drowned and I was found. If it’s all one to me tonight, it wasn’t all one to them the next night. Yet, if it wasn’t myself, not a thing did they lose but an old back tooth.” *

The Brothers Grimm tell us about one who at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave them their best stories, a woman from near Kassel. “Her memory kept a firm grip on all the sagas. She herself knew that this gift was not granted to everyone, and that there were many who could remember nothing connectedly. She told her stories thoughtfully, accurately, with wonderful vividness, and evidently had delight in doing it. First, she related them from beginning to end, and then, if required, repeated them more slowly, so that after some practice, it was perfectly easy to write from her dictation.” Very likely, because they had to write down her words, the Brothers Grimm laid stress upon this storyteller’s verbal memory; others in listening to her might have thought that her real gift was perception of pattern, and her real accomplishment making it, the pattern, evident.

“There were those who could remember nothing connectedly.” We might say that they were the mediocre storytellers who confused the pattern by putting incidents in the wrong place, by using unfitting metaphors, by making a hurried beginning or a hurried end, by being unable to use the chiming words that made special—or, as we would say now, that featured some passage: ‘puddle’ with ‘path,’ ‘tooth’ with ‘lose,’ for example.

The rhythm of night, marked in the place where it was told, set the mood without which the traditional story would have diminished appeal. The household arts there were unvarying from generation to generation, and so were the patterns of the stories. One did not introduce new designs into weaving or cart-building, and one did not introduce new designs into storytelling. We have been told that the hearers of traditional stories wanted to have remembered incidents,