Toward an Understanding of Storytelling Events

DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, students of man set ambitious goals for themselves. Laymen and scholars alike amassed impressive quantities of ethnographic information, organized it into convenient categories, and deduced from it striking generalizations about the uniformity of cultures and the unity of man. Among the data that came under scrutiny were stories through which men described the workings of their universe and narrated exploits of members of their species. The Greek literati of later antiquity were the first, apparently, to focus on such stories and to advance speculations concerning the nature of their content; classical writers and their successors utilized these stories as sources, resources, and models for imaginative creations. But it was the discovery by the Grimm Brothers of the existence of such narratives among German peasants, and the hypotheses they advanced concerning the possible relationships between the stories of the nonliterate and the narratives found in the written literatures of other nations and