Storytelling
Gardens For Storytelling
Telling stories is older than language. Cave men told stories by drawing on the walls of caves, and tribes danced their stories to share news. In the Middle Ages, which lasted from the 5th century to the 15th century in Western Europe, storytellers would travel from town to town, carrying news and entertainment in exchange for a place to spend the night and food to eat. They made new friends along the way.
Gardens For Storytelling
Over 600 years ago, an Italian writer described a royal storytelling garden this way. Notice that 600 years ago the English language was used differently than it is now.
Can you read this, or listen to someone read this, and then put it into your own words?
If you could have a storytelling garden, what would it look like?
“Thus dismissed by their new queen, the company sauntered gently through a garden, the young men saying sweet things to the fair ladies, who wove fair garlands of divers sorts of leaves and sang love-songs.
‘Shortly after noon the queen rose, and roused the rest of the ladies, as also the young men, averring that it was injurious to the health to sleep long in the daytime. They therefore hied them to a meadow, where the grass grew green and luxuriant, being nowhere scorched by the sun, and a light breeze gently fanned them. So at the queen’s command they all ranged themselves in a circle on the grass, and hearkened while she thus spoke:
‘You mark that the sun is high, the heat intense, and the silence unbroken save by the cicadas among the olive-trees. It were therefore the height of folly to quit this spot at present. Here the air is cool and the prospect fair, and here, observe, are dice and chess. Take, then, your pleasure as you may be severally minded; but, if you take my advise, you will find pastime for the hot hours before us, not in play, in which the loser must needs be vexed, and neither the winner nor the onlooker much the better pleased, but in telling of stories, in which the invention of one may afford solace to all the company of his hearers.’ “
Boccaccio, The Decameron, 14th century