Five Timeless Books Rooted in Oral Storytelling

These five books have all grown out of diverse oral storytelling traditions. Can you tell us more?

As humans, telling stories is what we do. The stories that are passed from generation to generation both express and shape our values and, of course, entertain us. There is something very comforting about reading these ancient tales, imagining how a storyteller would enthral the audience, adding comedic touches here and suspenseful elements there. For this list, I have chosen five books rooted in oral storytelling from around the world, from a beloved Chinese historical novel through the story of a dazzling Arabic warrior woman, to a modern retelling of Beowulf.

Your first book recommendation is Grendel by John Gardner. Would you tell us about the book, and how it was influenced by oral storytelling?

Grendel is a 1971 novel based on the Old English poem Beowulf. In essence, the story is that a monster called Grendel plagues the great hall of King Hrothgar, a 6th century Danish king. Beowulf, a hero from Götaland in Sweden, comes to kill the monster and also has to face Grendel’s mother and, later in life, a dragon.

Grendel is a retelling of the story from the monster’s point of view, and the monster is basically Jean-Paul Sartre. What makes this slim novel so brilliant is that Grendel is a philosopher, but he is also absolutely a monster. He lives in a cave with his blob of a mother and has all the instincts to kill, eat and survive. At the same time, he has a mind that ponders meaning—relentlessly searching for answers, he wants to know what it is all for.

“The stories that are passed from generation to generation both express and shape our values ”

Grendel is bewildered by the behaviour of humans, who both fascinate and disgust him, and is furious with himself for his need to spy on them. Poetry is the only thing that moves him. In this novel, the character of the Shaper—the storyteller—is more significant than that of Beowulf. The hero, after all, is only as great as the monster he pits himself against.

Grendel is a thought-provoking and, at times, funny retelling of the ancient story about the monster that might come and get us at any time, preferably in the dark. Unbound by convention and unconcerned with anachronisms, this novel is not only an energetic and enjoyable take on the well-known monster-slaying tale, but also on our existentialist search for meaning.

The next book you have selected is Three Kingdoms, a 14th-century novel attributed to Luo Guanzhong. This edition was translated into English by Moss Roberts.

Three Kingdoms is not just an epic historical novel, it’s one of the most influential novels of all time. It has shaped Chinese thinking about war, power and diplomacy for centuries, and its characters continue to loom large in the imagination today. It is still a staple of professional oral storytellers who bring to life the drama of battle and inject humour into the larger-than-life characters.

Set in the 3rd century, the novel features many historical figures and events. Authorship is attributed to Luo Guanzhong, who lived in the 14th century. You can choose an abridged version, but I have found it very comforting to spend time with the full length, 120-chapter novel—surprising, I admit, considering that the Three Kingdoms period was one of the deadliest in history. The body count by the end of the novel is in the millions.

Three Kingdoms is storytelling on the grandest of scales. It starts as the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) is drawing to a close, when court administration has become so corrupt that rebellion looms and outlaws swarm like hornets. Three men swear an oath of allegiance to uphold the Han, and their brotherhood takes centre stage. There are some very strong female characters, but they feature in a tiny fraction of the page count. Other main characters include the ruthless and ambitious Cao Cao, who is wonderfully complex, and Kongming, a master strategist and weapons designer with supernatural powers.

Much of the novel is concerned with virtue; how to be a successful commander and righteous ruler. But this is no simplistic battle between good and evil. The question soon arises of what price it is acceptable to pay to achieve a greater purpose. Inevitably, there is conflict between duty and honour, and different views on what constitutes a legitimate dynastic succession. These issues give the novel depth, as the narrative unfolds through battles and ambushes, coalitions and betrayals, elaborate stratagems and convoluted counter-plots.

Readers are confronted with warfare in all its complexity. Armchair commanders in the novel quote Sunzi but have no idea how to deal with a rapidly developing crisis. The characters constantly face questions that have no easy answers: how to deal with alternative opinions from your own advisers, the potential consequences of harsh or lenient punishments, how to treat untrustworthy allies or rumours intended to sow distrust…

As military fortunes wax and wane over the course of the novel, what we are left with is a sense of the cyclical nature of history. The version of Three Kingdoms most popular today dates from the 1660s. That was when this famous opening line was added: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”

Thank you. Shall we talk next about The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman: The Arabic Epic of Dhat al-Himma? This version has been edited and translated by Melanie Magidow.

The Tale of Princess Fatima is an action- and adventure-filled heroic tale, and has been a favourite of oral storytellers from Cairo to Marrakesh. The English translation is a slim volume, a selection of episodes from a long epic featuring Princess Fatima (Al-amīra Dhāt al-Himma), her son ‘Abdelwahhab, and many other characters including a stellar cast of dazzling women warriors. The whole epic spans around 150 years starting from the late 7th century, and is set in the Arabian Peninsula and the Arab-Byzantine borderlands, today’s Syria-Turkey border. It is thought to date from the 12th century.

Things do not start well, when Fatima’s father is so disappointed she is not a son, that he wants her killed at birth. Servants intervene and bring her up but, when still a young child, Fatima is abducted in a raid and set to work herding camels and horses for a rival Bedouin tribe. She teaches herself martial arts and horsemanship, which is just as well because she soon needs to protect herself against an unwelcome suitor.

Fatima is a pious Muslim and, other than that, all she wants is to be a warrior. She has no interest in marriage, but suitors simply will not leave her be. For fear of spoilers, suffice it to say that she encounters some serious challenges in her private life, whilst her heroic deeds on the battlefield move beyond tribal skirmishes to battles (and occasionally alliances) with Byzantine armies. We also meet Nura, an intelligent and brave beauty who causes Fatima a lot of headaches because Fatima’s warriors tend to take leave of their senses in Nura’s presence, adding a comic element.

The English translation is recent and very accessible for contemporary audiences. It is a gift for non-Arabic readers to get to know this ancient entertaining tale, as Princess Fatima overcomes poor odds to become the most formidable warrior of her age.

Great. Next let’s move to Grettir’s Saga, translated by Jesse Byock. The Icelandic sagas are the product of a famous oral storytelling tradition.

Iceland, per capita, is said to print the most books and have the most published authors of any country in the world. This is nothing new. Long before sagas were written down, Icelanders were known as master storytellers. Living in a frontier land settled by Norsemen in the 9th century, they had an extraordinary geographic reach, translated voraciously from other languages, and told many different types of sagas.

Grettir’s Saga is an outlaw saga, telling the story of the anti-hero Grettir from his early years as a difficult teen who quarrelled with his father, to a man famed for his strength and courage, to a hunted man with a bounty on his head.

Things look promising for Grettir at first. He wins admiration by helping others defend against pillaging berserkers, proves very effective in getting rid of trolls and monsters, and is sought after for putting a stop to hauntings and the walking dead. But Grettir is not an easy man to get on with, and with a history of violence he ends up sentenced to full outlawry, meaning that nobody can offer him refuge or help him leave Iceland. What makes life on the run especially hard for this most macho of men is that he is incredibly afraid of the dark. That, and a man who has it in for Grettir keeps sending assassins after him, resorting to ever more extreme methods to finish him off once and for all.

There is an intriguing after-story of vengeance, romance and dubious morals which takes place in Constantinople, centred on Grettir’s Norwegian brother Thorstein, who joins the Byzantine emperor’s Varangian guard to seek out Grettir’s antagonist.

Thank you. And I think that brings us to your final book recommendation, The Kushnameh by Iranshah ibn Abu’l-Khayr. This is an epic poem drawn from Persian oral storytelling traditions and translated into English by Kaveh L. Hemmat.

The Kushnameh is a fantastical story of an anti-hero with tusks and elephant ears. Dating from the early twelfth century, the style feels close to that of an epic poem, with declamatory prose and often very beautiful turns of phrase. The action sweeps cinematically from the Korean to the Iberian peninsula, across a surprisingly connected medieval world.

The story begins with a frame tale, where the narrative sits within another tale, like in 1001 Nights. In this frame tale, Alexander the Great comes across a statue of Kush the Tusked and seeks out a hermit who can tell him about this warrior king. So, alongside Alexander, the reader is told this unusual tale of utopia and tyranny, of mace-wielding warriors, moon-faced beauties and loyal advisers. As the action moves from Besila (the ancient Korean kingdom of Silla) to the Pyrenees, we hear of Nubians, Arabs, Hindus and Turks, and of many cities and countries along the way, most still familiar to us today.

Abandoned by his father at birth because of his monstrous appearance, Kush is raised by Abtin who is biding his time in exile in China until he can restore his family’s dynasty on the throne in Iran. Kush grows into a formidable warrior entirely corrupted by his own power. Even Zahhak, the evil figure with a snake growing out of each shoulder, is shocked at how Kush treats his own children—never mind his oppressed subjects or unfortunate enemies on the battlefield.

Against a backdrop of ancient legends, readers are faced with questions of nature and nurture, of what a monster really is and whether he can be reformed. What I find most fascinating is the book’s geographical range. From East Asia to the Horn of Africa, from Central Asia to Andalusia, we get a sense of the value placed not only on wisdom, but on travel in search of knowledge.