Not Just For Bards

At the beginning of the semester I wasn't quite sure what to expect from my Scottish Lit. class. I'm not usually all that fond of survey classes, and especially not of "classical" survey types which are entirely devoted to, or at least emphasize, books whose ages are counted in centuries rather than years.

However, this class is turning out to be oodles of fun. For starters, the professor is incredibly flexible about which topics we explore in our essays. So, I've been reading and writing all about ballads and sea shanties, with a plan to work up, chronologically, to talking about Great Big Sea and others who are in my CD collection. I've been finding a lot of interesting stuff about oral traditions and folklore in the process.

For seconders (or however that goes to transition from "starters"), the past two classes we've had guest speakers - though "speakers" isn't exactly accurate. Last week we had Jack and Barbara Yule (Jack's a native Scot and Barbara has spent a couple decades doing scholarly work about Scottish storytelling tradition). Buckets of fun, especially when Barbara told us about the Traveling People and performed a couple of stories for us.

Then, last night we had Kim McKee and Ken Willson a.k.a The Jigheads. They played music, talked about storytelling/folk music tradition, and Ken told us a story. Also excellent.

Now, from here we get back to one of the questions of writing which is infinitely fascinating - the purpose of doing it. When you look at oral traditions, storytelling was very fundamental. The stories were who the people were, they told their histories, their morality, their religious beliefs, and they were one of the ways the group identified themselves as being X rather than Y.

These days, we don't have the same oral tradition. Other media has replaced the spoken word, and ethnic tales have become internationally known. Still, I would suggest that much of the storytelling imperative has remained. I can think of a number of different ways to go with this, and I probably will go in those directions in subsequent posts, but I'm going to narrow it all down today.

Oral tradition. Communal stories. We don't have the bards these days, but we can't entirely get away from our roots. Back in the day you had a tribe and in that tribe there were the songs and the stories that everybody knew and that knitted the group together into a community. These days we tend to have the exact same thing, just expressed a bit differently.

Instead of the tribal stories, we have family stories. You know, the one about when you were little and you did that incredibly funny thing that everybody still talks about. Maybe it started out being your story, it's about you, after all, but now you know it by the telling just as well (or even better) than you know it because it happened to you. Maybe it started out your story, but now your parents, siblings, etc. are the ones who tell it. Everybody knows how it goes, everybody knows how it ends, but it keeps getting told. It's part of your family's mythology now, it's what knits you together as a family and it's what identifies you as X rather than Y.

Ditto that for any group of friends you've known for a while. After a while, you learn the stories of the others. After a while, when someone starts talking about a specific thing, you can anticipate the story that's coming next. Of course, we have our communal "music," too. Most of us in the writers group have watched Joss Whedon's shows and read something by Neil Gaiman. Great Big Sea is a literal example of our common music, and Deb's got a nifty clip up on her blog, the posting of which is perfectly timed to this posting. (Gotta love synchronicity.)

So, to get to the main point here: though the particulars of our storytelling traditions have changed from the times of bards and sagas, the jist remains the same. If there was nothing to this idea of communal music, you'd never swap CDs with your friends, would you?