It occurred to me after last week’s post that it is worth spending a little bit more time on the etymology of the words we are using since the word “story” has its own, ummm, story that helps to shed some light on the confusing number of meanings that are at play around the concept. Understanding these broader meanings in advance will help to clarify the specific meaning that I will be using in this series.
Let’s start by talking about the Old English word for “story”, which was “tale”. It’s related to the word “tell”, and it originally had a connotation of “giving an account” or “recounting”. In other words, the default meaning was about things that actually happened in the real world. We can see a similar semantic alignment in the modern German “Geschichte” (story), which is related to “geschehen”, meaning “to happen”.
The important point to note here is that the default meaning of the word was tailored to the everyday kinds of stories we tell each other. It’s something that is so basic and familiar that we rarely think about it, but we are always telling stories, and those stories are assumed to be based in reality. We may misremember the details. We may fabricate things to sex it up a bit. We may leave out the bits that make us look bad or emphasise those that make us look good. Nevertheless, the default assumption in an everyday kind of story is that we are “telling the truth”.
This can be contrasted with another kind of story, which is one that is deliberately made up in order to entertain or educate. It seems that most languages have a specific word that denotes a made-up story alongside a role for the person who does the making up. In Old English, a professional storyteller was called a “scop”, and the story they told was called a “spell”. “Spell” was related to “speech”, since stories were always delivered orally in a culture that was almost entirely illiterate.
The word “scop” had a broader meaning of “create or make”. You could scop a story. You could scop a table or a pair of trousers. Storytelling was a trade like any other. This broader meaning of creating something is also present in Aristotle’s Poetics. The actual word in Greek was “poiesis”, which also meant to make or construct. Since Aristotle was writing about Greek tragedy, and since Greek tragedy was created by professionals who specialised in the role, it made sense for him to use poiesis rather than a term that denoted everyday storytelling. He was concerned with identifying the criteria that could be used to judge the quality of a finished work of art just like you might judge the quality of a bottle of wine or a painting.
Thus, both Old English and ancient Greek maintained a distinction between “everyday story told by people recounting events that happened” and “story made up by a skilled practitioner for education or entertainment”. It was much the same distinction we have now with the “entertainment industry”. However, the trade of storyteller also included something of what we would nowadays think of as journalism, i.e. stories about current events. Professional storytellers were also given licence to make sense of events rather than simply recount them. That’s why the greatest storytellers have always been seen as religious or mystical figures capable of capturing fundamental truths of existence.
None of this had anything to do with the word “story” which was not present in Old English and whose original meaning in ancient Greek had nothing to do with “tales” or “mythos” or any other word that denotes a narrative. Nevertheless, there was a good reason why the Greek word “historia” eventually came to be associated with “stories”.
Because the distinction between factual and fictional stories is always getting blurred in everyday life (just look at the amount of nonsense on the internet for an example), trying to get to the truth through stories can be problematic. Most of the great myths that we know had some basis in reality, but they normally come with countless embellishments of questionable veracity. Over time, stories tend to lose their fidelity to the original event.
Enter the role of the “historian”. Herodotus is usually credited with being the father of history, and one of the reasons was because he used the actual word “historia” to refer to a book he wrote. This book is still translated into English as “The Histories”, but this is somewhat misleading because that is not the original meaning of the word. “Historia” could get translated into modern English as “enquiry”, although its meaning is even wider than what we would think of by that word. For the Greeks, “historia” could refer to an empirical investigation of the kind we now think of science, but it could also denote an intellectual or philosophical rumination. A classic example is Aristotle’s “Historia Animalium”, meaning “Enquiry into Animals”, the first text of what we would now call “zoology”.
Herodotus was using the word “historia” because he was conducting an enquiry into various beliefs that were floating around in the different communities of the time. In actual fact, his work was probably the earliest form of what we would now call “anthropology”. He travelled around a lot, collecting folk stories from various communities, getting different perspectives on wars and other major events, etc. He then collated these enquiries into a book which, while it does contain a great many stories, also has a lot of reflections, anecdotes, and titbits. It was a serious work but was also designed to be entertaining.
The use of “historia” by Herodotus, Aristotle and other Greek thinkers makes clear that they all understood the word to mean “enquiry”. However, sometime between the golden age of the Greeks and the rise of Rome, the word’s meaning changed so that in the Latin of the time of Caesar it had come to denote the exact same semantic meanings present in old English “tale” or Greek “mythos”. That is, it was primarily a narrative of events.
Any last remembrance of “historia” as enquiry disappeared as the Roman Empire slid into the dark ages, and the whole idea of a professional intellectual was lost. The meaning of “historia” as “story” lived on in the Romance languages and came into English via the Norman invasion. Because of the prestige that the French language enjoyed for some time afterwards, “story” elbowed “tale” out of the way to take top spot among the myriad of words that all mean something like “narrative of events”.
That’s the way it remained for several hundred years, but there is one final twist in the tale. Beginning around the time of the Renaissance, Western culture was once again able to create for itself an intellectual class that had the time and space to make enquiries. Since “historia” also existed in shortened form as “storia”, and since this distinction was also present in English, it makes some kind of sense that “history” came to refer to the enquiries of an intellectual called a “historian”, while “story” retained its meaning of a “narrative of events” used primarily by everyday people. Meanwhile, the role of those who created stories for education and entertainment fell to “artists”, “authors”, etc. Thus, we have ended up with the same basic set of meanings that existed in the Greece of more than two millennia ago.
So, that is the story about how the word “story” came to mean “story”. But we still haven’t answered the question: what is a “story”? The beginnings of an answer may be found in the tale we have just told.
The word “story” has been on one hell of a journey. It began life during the epoch-making period where the ancient Greek civilisation flourished, enjoying the company of the great thinkers who founded modern philosophy and science. It went on holiday during the Roman Empire, spreading wherever the Latin tongue found a home. It eked out a living with the European peasantry of the Dark Ages, hitched a ride on a French ship to the isle which would eventually create a global empire, and now enjoys a status as probably one of the best-known words in the world since it denotes a universal concept in a language that has become all but universal. Along the way, “story” has undergone a number of changes including the way it is spoken and spelt and the meaning it denotes. Therein lies the heart of any true story. We’ll explore that more next week.
