Storytellers don't get sick days. Last week, while I knew my voice sounded "rusty" thanks to a viral infection, it worked out because it was a room with good acoustics. That evening's Dinner Detective and maybe this week, too, works out as part of the fun of improvisation. We'll see. Have a ton of prescriptions and at least it's not Covid.
In the meantime I went story hunting and found Andrew Lang in his The Red Fairy Book had something to say about voices in this Romanian story of "The Voice of Death." Project Gutenberg gives the story, but misses a fine illustration. My book's copy only says "With numerous illustrations by H.J. Ford and Lancelot Speed." Don't know which artist did this.
THE VOICE OF DEATH
Once upon a time there lived a man whose one wish and prayer was to get rich.
Day and night he thought of nothing else, and at last his prayers were granted,
and he became very wealthy. Now being so rich, and having so much to lose, he
felt that it would be a terrible thing to die and leave all his possessions
behind; so he made up his mind to set out in search of a land where there was
no death. He got ready for his journey, took leave of his wife, and started.
Whenever he came to a new country the first question that he asked was whether
people died in that land, and when he heard that they did, he set out again on
his quest. At last he reached a country where he was told that the people did
not even know the meaning of the word death. Our traveller was delighted when
he heard this, and said:
‘But surely there are great numbers of people in your land, if no one
ever dies?’
‘No,’ they replied, ‘there are not great numbers, for you see
from time to time a voice is heard calling first one and then another, and
whoever hears that voice gets up and goes away, and never comes back.’
‘And do they see the person who calls them,’ he asked, ‘or do
they only hear his voice?’
‘They both see and hear him,’ was the answer.
Well, the man was amazed when he heard that the people were stupid enough to
follow the voice, though they knew that if they went when it called them they
would never return. And he went back to his own home and got all his
possessions together, and, taking his wife and family, he set out resolved to
go and live in that country where the people did not die, but where instead
they heard a voice calling them, which they followed into a land from which
they never returned. For he had made up his own mind that when he or any of his
family heard that voice they would pay no heed to it, however loudly it called.
After he had settled down in his new home, and had got everything in order
about him, he warned his wife and family that, unless they wanted to die, they
must on no account listen to a voice which they might some day hear calling
them.
For some years everything went well with them, and they lived happily in their
new home. But one day, while they were all sitting together round the table,
his wife suddenly started up, exclaiming in a loud voice:
‘I am coming! I am coming!’
And she began to look round the room for her fur coat, but her husband jumped
up, and taking firm hold of her by the hand, held her fast, and reproached her,
saying:
‘Don’t you remember what I told you? Stay where you are unless you
wish to die.’
‘But don’t you hear that voice calling me?’ she answered.
‘I am merely going to see why I am wanted. I shall come back
directly.’
So she fought and struggled to get away from her husband, and to go where the
voice summoned. But he would not let her go, and had all the doors of the house
shut and bolted. When she saw that he had done this, she said:
‘Very well, dear husband, I shall do what you wish, and remain where I
am.’
So her husband believed that it was all right, and that she had thought better
of it, and had got over her mad impulse to obey the voice. But a few minutes
later she made a sudden dash for one of the doors, opened it and darted out,
followed by her husband. He caught her by the fur coat, and begged and implored
her not to go, for if she did she would certainly never return. She said
nothing, but let her arms fall backwards, and suddenly bending herself forward,
she slipped out of the coat, leaving it in her husband’s hands. He, poor
man, seemed turned to stone as he gazed after her hurrying away from him, and
calling at the top of her voice, as she ran:
‘I am coming! I am coming!’
When she was quite out of sight her husband recovered his wits and went back
into his house, murmuring:
‘If she is so foolish as to wish to die, I can’t help it. I warned
and implored her to pay no heed to that voice, however loudly it might
call.’
Well, days and weeks and months and years passed, and nothing happened to
disturb the peace of the household. But one day the man was at the
barber’s as usual, being shaved. The shop was full of people, and his
chin had just been covered with a lather of soap, when, suddenly starting up
from the chair, he called out in a loud voice:
‘I won’t come, do you hear? I won’t come!’
The barber and the other people in the shop listened to him with amazement. But
again looking towards the door, he exclaimed:
‘I tell you, once and for all, I do not mean to come, so go away.’
And a few minutes later he called out again:
‘Go away, I tell you, or it will be the worse for you. You may call as
much as you like but you will never get me to come.’
And he got so angry that you might have thought that some one was actually
standing at the door, tormenting him. At last he jumped up, and caught the
razor out of the barber’s hand, exclaiming:
‘Give me that razor, and I’ll teach him to let people alone for the
future.’
And he rushed out of the house as if he were running after some one, whom no
one else saw. The barber, determined not to lose his razor, pursued the man,
and they both continued running at full speed till they had got well out of the
town, when all of a sudden the man fell head foremost down a precipice, and
never was seen again. So he too, like the others, had been forced against his
will to follow the voice that called him.
The barber, who went home whistling and congratulating himself on the escape he
had made, described what had happened, and it was noised abroad in the country
that the people who had gone away, and had never returned, had all fallen into
that pit; for till then they had never known what had happened to those who had
heard the voice and obeyed its call.
But when crowds of people went out from the town to examine the ill-fated pit
that had swallowed up such numbers, and yet never seemed to be full, they could
discover nothing. All that they could see was a vast plain, that looked as if
it had been there since the beginning of the world. And from that time the
people of the country began to die like ordinary mortals all the world
over.[13]
This
is part of a series of postings of stories under the category,
"Keeping the Public in Public Domain." The idea
behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the
authors and their immediate heirs were compensated. I feel
strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the
20th century. My
own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public
Domain I decided to share stories from them. I hope you enjoy
discovering new stories.
At
the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates
projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an
audience. Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing
of Public Domain stories will not occur that week. This is a return to
my regular posting of a research project here. (Don't worry, this
isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future
storytelling to an audience.) Response has convinced me that "Keeping
the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other
postings as often as I can manage it.
Other
Public Domain story resources I recommend-
There
are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for
folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's
database, Yashpeh,
the International Folktales Collection. I have long
recommended it and continue to do so. He has loaded
Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so
you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression
you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm
You may have noticed I'm no
longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his
offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking
specific types of stories. There's another site, FairyTalez
claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales,
folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for
phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
Between those two sites, there
is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait,
there's more!"
The
email list for storytellers, Storytell,
discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional
suggestions:
-
Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible
through the Wayback Machine, described below, but the late Jackie Baldwin's
wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google
search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ . It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for December 22 2016 and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.
- Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com
doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her
way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for
finding new books and stories to love and tell.
You're
going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT
go to the Internet Archive
Wayback Machine to find some of these old links. Tim's
site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a
full-time job. In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that
Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she
could no longer maintain it. Possibly searches maintained it.
Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim
Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old
Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library
(something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine. It
took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally
in December of 2006 it appears!
Somebody
as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website
is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.
I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can
be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that
becomes the only way to find them.
You
can see why I recommend these to you.
Have fun
discovering even more stories
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