The Original

An event, which has happened twice over the last week, has prompted me to take a moment to write about an issue that often arises in the field of storytelling and oral tradition. I have been keeping very busy, planning out the upcoming ventures into the various regions of the Harz, and this has largely consisted of examining my small collection of books of the Harz Legends, selecting the stories I feel most interesting and relevant to the surrounding area, and dividing the tales into respective regions of study. There are hundreds of tales, and it has been a challenge to force myself to limit the selected legends to about 7 per region--the regions being North Harz, East Harz, South Harz, West Harz, and Upper Harz. In all, I have selected 35 legends that I will focus on. During the project I will remain flexible, in the event that a tale I had neglected proves to be more relevant than one I had included; however, this will make a solid starting point. (I plan to give a video presentation of how this will all line up in the next week.)

While examining my books and pinpointing the locations of where each tale takes place, I realized the primary book I was working off of was insufficient, as it neglects large portions of the Southern and Upper Harz regions. I went in search of more books, also realizing I would need to verify the German titles of each tale so folks would understand which legends I was referring to when it came time to ask the locals.

The first individual I met with was Uli Hecht, a retired German Literature teacher, Rotarian, and lifelong resident of Halberstadt. We met in the small library in his home--a nicely renovated Inn, which had belonged to his family for generations. We spoke for a few hours about my life and his life, as well as about my plans in the Harz. He offered a few books from his collection that I could examine, and noted that for my project to be a success, it would be very important for me to "be sure and use the original versions" of the legends.

A few days later I was in a small used bookstore looking through the shelf containing a few books on Harz Legends. I asked the book handler which books she felt were the better of the bunch. She pulled out two, one with illustrations and one with only text. She claimed the book with pictures was very pretty, but the stories were abridged. The other book, she stated, contained "the original versions."

Like Uli's comment, she may have meant this to say they were complete in comparison to the children's book, but I couldn't help responding by telling her there was no such thing as an "original version." Any version, whether it was written down two hundred years ago, or told at the bar last night is a new version. Some of these stories are several hundred years old, and simply because someone decided to write them down in 1853 does not mean it is the "original version."

My outlook on stories is vastly influenced by my studies at Nevada. Stories will always grow and change because it is in their nature. They do not simply exist for a single moment, and then, unchanging, become cataloged in the human experience. Everyone who tells and retells a story adds or subtracts something of their own from it--whether intentional or not. I would go as far as to say that even the first time a story is ever told, it is not the "original version." Something influenced this tale, and certain elements are bound to have come from somewhere else. Much like music, there is no original Rock and Roll song. Rock came from Blues, and Blues came from a mix of Gospel and Slave Hymns, and each of these genres have an influence of their own. "It's turtles all the way down." Since the first time a cave man grunted the simplest melody, he was influenced by the birds, or the sound of a stream, or even the beat of his own heart; and that was the story of his tune.

I'm not here to track down the original anything. I am not here to find the purest form of any of these stories and capture it between the pages of a book as a sort of trophy for a story-sleuth. I am here, however, to find out what the influences of these stories may have been, and through what contexts were they created. Who told these stories, and why?--and for what reason might they still have a need to be told today? If anything, I will be thrilled if I end up not having to take anything from the books. Ideally, the stories will be told fresh to me, within a whole new context, and this will be the version I choose to document. In the end--when it comes to a story--you can't capture it and you can't restrain it, nor can you accelerate its flight among tongues. All you can do is tell it, and hope that it will one day find the right ears to hear it.