Chapter 35: Day 34

Day 34,

Morning thought: From research and asking around that I’ve been doing on the side, it seems that while it’s one of two annual dry seasons now, when I first arrived it was the tail end of the rainy season.  It looks like that day I danced in the rain and saw Maiko for the second time was probably the last big rain of the season, and it will probably be a few months before we see its like again.

 

It’s a funny thing, the story books in the archive.  Most of them are collections of stories and of the ones I recognize they are almost all abridged summaries.  For instance, I found the archival copy of the story I told Cass’s family that first night they let me ride into the Village with them.  While the original that I remember was a novel hundreds of pages long with minutely detailed scenery and dialogue, this one was only a couple dozen pages and only the most notable quotes were still explicitly called out (and a few that may have been paraphrased or made up by the transcriber).

I’m also getting the impression that most of these anthologies are grouped by the outsider that brought them here.  They’re certainly not grouped much by genre, age, or original author beyond what one might expect from a given reteller having particular tastes or favorites.  That said, there are a handful of books that seem to have been the effort of some past archivist or another to re-transcribe them into more thematically coherent volumes.

The other thing that sticks out – more obviously now that I’ve experienced the additional role of Village archivist – is how these abridgements tend to be adapted in a rather particular way, beyond just what one might expect from outsiders writing down foreign tales from memory.  That is to say, the more I read them, the more I get the impression that these are adaptations meant more for spoken tellings than for reading.  In a few I’ve even found notes scribbled in the margins suggesting tones of voice to take or gestures to make or mnemonics for remembering particular points.  I find myself thinking of how many oral traditions had a metered, poetic quality to them to make them easier to memorize and pass on.  These aren’t quite that structured, but read enough and one does get a sense for the voice and speech patterns of the transcriber of any given anthology.  I wonder, if one were to read this journal, or my other one containing memories of before the Village, would they get the same sense of me?

These are the thoughts that run through my head as I prepare to give a telling for a young girl’s birthday this evening.  Her favorite story was actually one unfamiliar to me and I had to look it up.  I don’t want to just tell her one she’s heard before but I felt I ought to find something in the same vein, either from the archive or from my own memories.  I think I’ve come up with one that should work, but there is one other aspect of many of the stories in this library that I’m still not sure how to handle.  It’s common for these adaptations to contain alterations to fit to the context and sensibilities of the Village.  Sometimes it’s changes in environment or animals to be more familiar to the people here, but most noticeably it’s a downplaying, altering, or even omission of violent elements.  Going back to that first story I mentioned, the original I remembered included a battle between five armies over the treasure that had been recovered from the dragon, but the archival copy skips straight from the dragon’s death to the hero’s return home.  In other stories villains, bandits, rampaging hordes, and the like are replaced with monsters, wild animals, and malign spirits.  I wonder how much of that is from archivists censoring and how much is from outsiders not wanting to corrupt this place with the seemingly foreign concepts of war and crime.  It also makes me stop and think how many of those stories I recall are seemingly inextricably bound up in violence.

 

Spending the night at the archive after returning from the birthday party.  Euadne, the kid’s name was.  Flowers and carved fruits made up most of the decorations, along with streamers that I imagine came from scrap pieces of cloth at her father’s work.  Where I might have expected a cake there was instead a large loaf of bread sliced into horizontal layers with thick preserves spread between each layer.  Something like you might end up with if someone who had no idea how to bake tried to explain a birthday cake to someone who had never seen one.  And reserved for the birthday girl was a rather unique dish consisting of (from what I could gather and interpret) a symbolically long strand of edible seaweed that had to be unrolled and consumed to reach what I understand to be a particularly tasty shellfish it had been wrapped around.

Most of the actual celebrating was done by the time I arrived, so I missed the larger portion of whatever birthday traditions and children’s games are practiced in the Village.  Under normal circumstances as the Archivist I might have been a more involved guest, but as tonight’s performance was largely as payment for a prior service things were a little bit different.  Or so I gathered from context and implication; nothing to that effect was explicitly stated.  For the same reason I refrained from partaking of the food more than what seemed to be required to acknowledge hospitality.

As for the story, I went with one about a girl who got turned into an old woman and went to go live with a wizard in his castle on legs.  It was one from my own memories that I hadn’t yet seen in the archives, and I wanted to give her something she definitely wouldn’t have heard before.  Even still, the real gift came when I reached a climactic moment of the story with the heroine in danger and paused dramatically until someone asked “and then what happened?”  Here, I turned to Euadne, smiled, and asked her what she thought should happen next.  It was a gamble, this departure from tradition, and when she froze up from the sudden attention of everyone in the room now on her I feared I’d committed a terrible faux pas.  But then as she gave her hesitant, whispered answer and I watched her eyes light up as I made her addition a part of the story, embellishing it to give it life, I grew more confident in my decision.  Twice more before the end I turned to her, and each time her own confidence in her answers grew.  It was no longer truly the original story anymore, and when I one day get around to transcribing it, Euadne's ending is the one I’ll put to paper.

 

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