The Soul Of Voice

The Soul of Voice: The Telling of Stories

Kiran Fane

Recently we had the pleasure of engaging with a part of the literary experience that is all too often overlooked. Oral storytelling still exists in fragments, from children’s bedtime stories to readings by famous authors. Yet this state of affairs is an inversion from the origins of tales. Writing was born in the ancient Mesopotamian city-state of Ur, but stories? Stories are as old as time. So when you listen to a reading, dramatic or otherwise, you are ordering the telling of tales into its natural, almost primal state.

Hyldyr Publishing organized a reading from their recent work, The Meresberg Spells, and, for me, the event was a wondrous reminder of that fact. As you may gather, this post is not our typical review but a glance into another topic of fascination for us. The oldest recovered examples of written language date back over five-thousand years to the ancient script of Sumerian cuneiform. As one can imagine, the area and its peoples would already have had a rich oral tradition filled with myths and stories. Would it surprise you then to learn that the first written words were not great tales of the gods and their deeds but instead lists of traded goods? This mundane truth in no way lessens the magic inherent in storytelling however. Indeed when one listens to the impassioned speaker reading from a text, the realities of the characters which make up that task are weighed little against the plucking of the heart-strings.

To be sure, the fantastical tales did not go long unwritten. The most famous of these works is, of course, The Epic of Gilgamesh. But, to my mind, the more fascinating story is the one recounting the invention of writing, by the inventors of writing. According to the ancient Sumerians, their written language was not developed, as records would indicate, simply to track the movement of goods and animals. In their telling, two kings engage in a contest of riddles, one setting the other increasingly impossible tasks. As their contest reaches its climax, one king finds his messenger, having been exhausted by his many trips across the desert, unable to speak his response to his rival king. Whether in exasperation or kindness, the king takes a lump of clay and writes his message upon it, thus inventing writing.

Why is this simple tale so intriguing? Because, unless our understanding is flawed, this story represents the fact that the crafting of fiction followed almost immediately after the invention of writing. Every time the modern writer sets pen to paper, they carry forward a tradition older than nations. Every time a dramatic reading of a work of ancient literature captures the hearts and minds of a crowd, we are carried to a time remembered only by the watching stars.