Storytelling Resources on the Web

[last updated 6/9/00]

Many good medieval storytelling sources may be found on the World Wide Web. I am indebted to Cariadoc, for suggesting many of these books, and to Wes Will (wwill@saluki-mail.siu.edu) and Greg Lindahl (lindahl@pbm.com) for providing many of the locations. If you notice any of these links to have moved or vanished, please notify me.

One warning before we start: Most of the material listed here got on the Web at least partially because it was not protected by copyright. This means that the translations of non-English works often date from the nineteenth century and earlier, and may not serve the needs of a modern audience as well as a modern translation. Moreover, they were typically scanned in by volunteer labor, and may contain numerous typos. If you're planning on following an actual text, rather than just the sequence of events in the story, you'd probably be well served by finding a modern translation as well.

Good General Starting Places

• The Codex Fabliauum. A document collectively created by the Carolingian Storytellers Guild and Aleksander Yevsha, cross-referencing geographical regions and time-periods, then listing story sources for each intersection. http://home.earthlink.net/~yevsha/SCA/codextoc.html
• The Internet Medieval Sourcebook. Lots of public domain versions of texts of all sorts of medieval texts. The sections on Literary Texts and Saint's Lives are the most obvious places for story material. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html
• The Online Medieval & Classical Library. Another good site for medieval texts. Most of their library is good storytelling material http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/
• The Internet Classics Archive. A good collection of classical literature, including the three big ones, The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. http://webatomics.com/Classics//index.html
• Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts. Not specifically medieval in focus, but of the lot of the material here is documented as being from period sources, and much of the rest is sufficiently 'mediaval-oid' to pass in most circles. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html
• The Middle English Collection at the Electronic Text Center, UVa. If you can get past the language barrier, there's some great stuff to be found here. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/mideng.browse.html
• Great Books Index. Not specifically medieval in focus, but quite a few of the entries here are from SCA period. http://www.mirror.org/books/gb.titles.html
• Celtica Lore, Myth, and Tradition. A collection of links to Celtic sites, most of which have good story material. http://www.conjure.com/CELT/clore.html

Some Specific Sources

Many of the following sources and descriptions were taken from Cariadoc's article on Period Sources for Story Telling, which may be found at http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cariadoc/period_sources_for_story_telling.html. The article is well worth giving a look at in its own right, as it talks about many good sources that are not available over the Web.

• The Golden Ass by Apuleius. A lengthy and episodic story written in the second century A.D. http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/fiction/apuleius/
• The Thousand and One Nights. The story of Scheherezade, which provides the frame story for the Nights, is mentioned by al-Nadim in the 10th century, but the surviving texts are considerably later, possibly 15th century. http://www.arabiannights.org/
• The Bible. It was extensively used as a source of stories in the Middle Ages. http://www.mirror.org/books/gb.bible.html,
  http://bible.gospelcom.net/ and many others.
• The Koran http://www.mirror.org/books/gb.quran.html
• Nasreddin Hoja. Short and funny Arabic tales. http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/43_folder/43_articles/43_molla.html
• The Mabinogion. A collection of Welsh stories written down in the 13th century, apparently based on much earlier verbal traditions. http://www.cyberphile.co.uk/~taff/taffnet/mabinogion/mabinogion.htm
• Boccaccio, The Decameron. 14th century. http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/dec_ov/toc.html
• Chaucer, Canterbury Tales. 14th century. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/mideng.browse.html
• Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur. 15th century. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengM.browse.html
• Njal Saga, Heimskringla, etc. The sagas are histories and historical novels, mostly written in Iceland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/Njal/, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/Heimskringla/, et. al.
• The Song of Roland. The earliest of the French Chansons de Geste, or "songs of deeds," dating from the late 11th century. http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/OMACL/Roland/
• Orlando Furioso (1516) by Ariosto. This is a Renaissance Italian reworking of the Matter of France -- the stories of Charlemagne and his Paladins. The story (and the characters) jump from Paris to London to Tartary, with or without intermediate stops. The tale is well supplied with magic rings, enchanted fountains, flying steeds, maidens in distress, valorous knights, both male and female, and wicked enchanters, also both male and female. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/Orlando/
  Note: This version is fairly bowdlerized and not very good poetry. I highly recommend the Barbara Reynolds translation, available from Penguin Books.
  My own Story Pages contain a number of episodes from these works.
• Ovid's Metamorphoses. An important source of Greek and Roman myths for Renaissance writers. http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.html
• The Ulster Cycle. A collection of many great Celtic stories. http://irelandnow.com/ulstercycle/frame.htm
• The Lays of Marie de France. Popular 12th century poems, based on Celtic material. http://saturn.vcu.edu/~cmarecha/#english
• Tales from Froissart. http://www.unipissing.ca/department/history/froissart/tales.htm

Blatant Plug: Most of the books published by Emerald Press also contain good story material.

Alexx's Home Page