ABSTRACT

The Eternal Chinese Storyteller Storytelling as an oral tradition and a professional art of performing long secular tales in serial instalments, has survived in China through more than a millennium into our own time, while similar orally transmitted and performed arts have fallen into oblivion in the West. The Homeric epics from the early part of the first millennium BC and the Icelandic sagas from about a thousand years ago belong in their recorded forms to the immortal works of the Western written legacy, while being at the same time monumental epitaphs of former oral traditions in Europe. In China the oral tradition of storytelling goes back at least to the Song dynasty (960-1279), and unlike the Greek and Nordic traditions, this genre of oral entertainment, based mainly on historical or pseudo-historical themes, has existed in China ever since.