What's in a Title?-Part Three

Tale

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, tale is from the Old English talu, meaning "series, calculation," also "story, tale, statement, deposition, narrative, fable, accusation, action of telling." Its origins are in the presumed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root word *del-, meaning "to recount, count." It's curious that a word that we think of as referring to talking and telling also refers to quantitative things. But if a tale is an accounting of events, one by one, in series order, then maybe it's not so curious after all. And if someone asks you to tell about a series of events, he might say, "Please recount for me what happened." Tell and talk are related words. Tell has its own quantitative uses, such as in telling time or bank teller. Curiously again, tally, referring sometimes to a count or sum, is unrelated to tale, despite their similarity in appearance. (Word and weird are also unrelated, despite the magic or glamour of words and despite the possibility that a man's fate must be spoken.)

I still have, from a long time ago, my copy of A Handbook to Literature by C. Hugh Holman (4th ed., 1980). I have looked inside for a definition of tale. Unfortunately, it's not very helpful. There's more to it than this, but the basic idea is that a tale is "[a] simple narrative in prose or verse without complicated plot." (p. 440) I like the "simple" part, also the uncomplicated plot part. Those seem to me among the essential characteristics of a tale. I'll once again offer "The Basket" by Herbert J. Mangham, from the first issue of Weird Tales, as an example of a tale. Simple, brief, and direct, "The Basket" can be read and absorbed in almost no time. Its effects on the reader are likely to be more enduring.

In his handbook definition, Holman wrote: "Formerly no very real distinction was made between the tale and the short story." I would like to work with the idea that there are actually distinctions, however. After all, the magazine is called Weird Tales, not Weird Stories. (Its more conventional companion magazine from 1938 to 1954 was entitled Short Stories.) I think it was called Weird Tales for a reason. As I wrote the other day, I think the magazine was named after a late nineteenth-century collection of Edgar Allan Poe's works. However, there may be more to it than that. I'll start with etymologies.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, story is from the Old French estorie or estoire, meaning "story, chronicle, history." Story is originally from Late Latin and comes from presumed PIE roots, *wid-tor-, ultimately from *weid-, "meaning 'to see,' hence 'to know'." Tale, then, is an Old English word, whereas story is Latinate. There will be more pairs like this in a while.

I'll assume that tale is an older word in English than is story. But is it an older form? More to the point, is there a cultural or historical difference between tales and short stories? Well, we talk about folktales, fairy tales, and tall tales. All are simple forms, all are old, and, significantly, I think, all are made by and for common people. We also have The Canterbury Tales, a collection in Middle English from the fourteenth century. Although Chaucer's tales were written down, the work itself is a series of tales that are told by a number of characters, some high, some low. In any case, in order to be complete, tales would appear to require a teller and a hearer, just as, perhaps, fate must be spoken.

So, I interpret the tale originally as a spoken form, a traditional or folk form, meant to be told and heard, the teller and the hearer being together in the same place and at the same time. On the other hand, I think of the short story as a more recent literary form meant to be read, perhaps in solitude, the author or storyteller being distant from the reader. Tales can be told in the absence of every kind of technology--every one but fire, that is, if the tale is to be told at night and to best effect. The short story, however, being a form that is read rather than heard, requires the more advanced technology of printing. And if it is to be a popular rather than a high or midlevel literary form, it must be mass produced for a mass-literate readership. And that readership must have enough disposable income to buy books, magazines, newspapers, and so on, if they are to enjoy printed stories. Only in the nineteenth century did mass technology, mass production, mass transportation, mass education, mass literacy, mass culture, and mass media begin to allow for that kind of thing. It's no mere coincidence that story magazines began to take off in the nineteenth century or that the first pulp magazine appeared in 1896, at the same time, by the way, as two other popular forms of storytelling, newspaper comics and commercial motion pictures.

By the way again, fiction and print are also Old French words from the Latin, also ultimately from presumed roots in PIE. Writer and author are split in their origins, the former being an Old English word, the latter Latinate.

So, weird, tale, tell, and writer are Old English words, while story, print, fiction, and author are Latinate. I have to assume that, as such, weird, tale, tell, and writer are older in the English language than are their Latinate counterparts. Science is also from the Old French and before that, from Latin, ultimately from PIE. That fact fits nicely here with a building thesis.

The tale is an older form than is the short story. Some tales are so old that we don't even know who first told them or who revised them along the way. The identity of the author--even the very concept of author--is relatively unimportant in regards to the tale. The identity of the author of a short story is an essential part of it, though. People read even the worst stories by Lovecraft or Hemingway, specifically because they were written by those men.

In the original sense, I think the tale was more nearly a folk form or something made by and for common people. The short story, on the other hand, is a higher form, made at least for the middle and upper classes, but, significantly in America, for the poor and working classes, too. Would there have been a pulp-fiction era if working men and women in America had not been literate and able to shell out here and there a nickel or a dime for a week or a month's worth of reading? There were tales in American history. Tall tales are an excellent example of that. But because our nation is in its essence democratic, we have also enjoyed at every level stories in print, specifically short stories in print, since very near our beginning. And again we arrive at that seminal figure in our literature, Edgar Allan Poe.

Tales are popular, whereas the short story is more nearly highbrow, or at least middle brow. Again, in America, high-brow and middle-brow culture has worked its way down into the lower classes and is equally available to them, even if it's in the form of barely literate or trashy pulp-fiction or confessionals or even pornography. For decades, pop culture was looked down upon by academia and other institutions of higher culture. Now everything has been turned on its head. Academia loves pop culture and despises every other kind. And every day in America, we seem to have another Alexandria of the mind: everything we hate must be burned to the ground, and would be, too, if only we could do it. I guess that's fitting in that the American imagination is very often apocalyptic.

Anyway, it seems to me that as an older form by and for the common people, the tale is more nearly conservative than is the short story, which was--at one time at least--an innovation and perhaps a product of what people call progress. Again, the magazine was called Weird Tales, not Weird Stories, even if a story like "The Call of Cthulhu" is not really a tale at all but a complex, sophisticated, and possibly modernistic short story reaching towards novelette length.

Anyway, that's all a lot of theorizing, or as my friend calls it, hypostulatin'. I'll make just two more points, both in regards to the weird tale versus simply the tale.

First, I think that an essential element of the weird tale is weird in the original sense of that expression, meaning fate or destiny, or even by extension doom. The implication is that there are limits beyond which we cannot, must not, and may not go. That doesn't stop us from trying, but if we try too hard or push the limits too far, we will suffer our fate, and it will be justly deserved. (1, 2) That seems to me a very biblical idea. Ultimately, weird fiction may be about the Fall of Man, or the punishment and chastening of Man, as in the story of the Flood or the Tower of Babel. Science fiction, being a modern fictional form, is less likely to recognize or observe limits or to punish--or even recognize--transgression. And so we have science-fictional heroes who aspire to and may even reach godlike power, all without fear of punishment for their extreme pride and ambition. In that sense, science fiction is progressive, whereas weird fiction, as it developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s, may be thought of as reactionary. It's a wonder anybody of today loves it. But then you can love a conservative or reactionary thing if you can expunge its earlier offenses. (3) You can love it as long as you wokeify it, decolonize it, Marxify it, and turn it into something exquisitely progressive. That may be what's going on with weird fiction today, just as it is in every other part of our culture. Maybe a reading of the current Weird Tales magazine would give us some clues.

Second, the weird tale seems to have been originally a spoken or oral form and only later written down or recorded. That suggests that a person's fate or weird is or must be spoken, possibly in his presence, rather than read silently and in solitude, that is, in the absence of the speaker or teller of his fate. That idea has implications, but I'll leave them be and go on with this series into different areas of investigation.

Notes
(1) There may be an exception in the conte cruel, in which a terrible fate may be arbitrary rather then deserved.
(2) Here's another by-the-way: the word doom is related to law or justice.
(3) That has happened with the World Fantasy Award, which used to be a statuette of H.P. Lovecraft but is now a sculpture of a bonsai tree making sexual advances on the moon.

To be continued . . .

Weird Tales, 1889

You can't tell it just from looking at the front cover, but here is an early collection of weird tales, Wild and Weird: Tales of Imagination and Mystery: Russian, English, and Italian, edited by Sir Gilbert Edward Campbell, Baronet (1838-1899), and published in London, New York, and Melbourne by Ward, Lock, and Company in 1889. This is the first omnibus edition, a rebinding of three previously printed paperbound books. The designs on the cover look like strap hinges. Maybe the intent was for the book to look old and weighty, like a tome, or, in the lexicon of weird fiction, a grimoire. The words wild and weird are often found in association, as they are here. But we aren't quite yet there in the formulation of the title Weird Tales, for those two component words are separated in the title of Campbell's book, one being in the main title, the other in the subtitle. Campbell, by the way, had his own wild and weird career. And note his Scottish surname: Scotsmen and Scotswomen will soon come into play in this series.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley