[Bards] Prose Tales

T'Star bedlamandmayhem at gmail.com
Wed May 2 07:17:28 PDT 2007


Greece was not part of WESTERN Europe, then again neither is
Scandinavia nor Poland nor Russia nor China nor Africa nor Japan.
Yet there are valid, accepted Chinese, Japanese, and Moorish Personas.
  If Greece isn't counted as 'part of Europe' then Scandinavia
probably isn't either... we're going to have a LOT of upset Vikings to
hear that!

Europe, geologically and geographically extends to the Ural mountains
in Russia.  Turkey is technically Asia, but the Byzantine influences,
especially on Christianity

Sources: A few very detailed Russian history classes that covered a
great many of these influences and word of mouth from other people.
One of my Russian language teachers was a historian.  And I've been
hunting down anyone I can find who's actually been able to get access
to some of these documents.

As for prose and 'professional bars', I can't speak from written
evidence, so I will use linguistic and social analysis to perform the
baseline until I can actually get to russia and read through some of
these texts.  (Not happening any time soon.)

Russian winters are roughly as long as Ansteorran summers and with the
requisite several feet of snow accompanying them, the Russian land
owners and Nobility (In Russia the terms were NOT synonymous.) would
find peasants with a gift for song, dance, tales... any form of
entertainment, and pay them to train in whichever art they were good
at.  There is evidence both from the structures of the dance
themselves and some of the documents of the time (again information
relayed to me from someone who had looked at the documents.) indicate
that what we term Russian folk dance was probably the predecessor to
modern Ballet.  So they had what we would term professional bards.
(They even hired people from Europe, which is how the dance moved OUT
of Russia.)

Linguistically there were several forms of entertainment, I will
mention the three most common.  You had "Poezi" that is "Poems,"
"Tans" that is Dance,  And "Skazki" that is stories.  Skazki in the
modern meaning is either a short story or a mythological story/Faerie
Tale/Tall Tale.  The original etymology of the word was simply a tale.
 I can find no even hints that "Skazki" were ever in verse, not in
language not anywhere.  The few I have been able to get my hands on in
the Russian have been exclusively in prose.  There is a style to it
but it is not in verse.  The opening sentence is analogous to our
"Once Upon a Time" though it is much more subtle to actually translate
"Once there was a...", and there is an increased usage of the
subjunctive forms.

So was prose professionally done in England pre-Elizibeathan era?  No
idea.  But there's a some linguistic and social evidence to say it WAS
done in Russia in period.  And given that Bards in the SCA are NOT the
same as Bards in period, I think we might do well to remember we are
the Society for Creative Anachronisms.  We are not "The Medieval
Reenactment Society."  A minstrel telling a story in period could very
easily get paid for it.  That is professional performance.  You don't
have to be patron sponsored in the SCA.  We don't have records of all
the little transactions of every day life.  We don't have record of
what street performers in down town Kiev in the time of Vladimir the
Great averaged.  Emphasis on period is good, but as we can take the
anacronysm too far we can go too far in forgetting we ARE anacronysms.
 Look!  We have how many different periods and countries represented
in this discussion alone?  One country may have spurned professional
story tellers, that doesn't mean all did, and doesn't make the prose
story any LESS of a valid bardic endeavor.

~Svetlana Andreivna Volkova



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