On the last Friday of every month for 25 years, people flocked to a particular pub in Edinburgh, The Waverley, to listen to stories—their new meeting place since 2016 has been The Circus Cafe. A guest speaker is announced for these storytelling evenings, yet anyone can share stories along a common theme. You might know that the Scottish term guid crack means ‘an entertaining story’ which could take many forms; sometimes storytellers bring instruments such as the fiddle, harmonica or didgeridoo, they might also sing a song or recite a poem. One evening a man with a South African accent told a story which I still carry with me. Unfortunately, I was unable to trace the origins of the tale: it may be from the oral tradition, it may be an urban myth. As I have been unable to trace a written or oral version I offer a brief summary of what I can remember. If you know the origins of this tale I would love to hear from you.

On Robben Island, off the coast of South Africa, every prisoner that arrived heard the words, “This is the Island. This is where you will die”. It was an all men’s prison. Everyone at the prison was referred to by number instead of their name. At night the men slept on the floor of small cells with a bucket for a toilet. By day they did hard labour in a quarry. Their one escape from this brutal work was exercise time when football was played in the prison courtyard. When Prisoner 46664 arrived another man threw a football at him and spat in his face. This became a daily ritual. Prisoner 46664 never responded with violence or anger. He looked the other man in the eyes each time this occurred, then walked away. The other man did not know what to think of this. One day this man was knocked down by some other inmates. Prisoner 46664 helped him to his feet and stood beside him ready to fight. The others backed away. ‘Why did you help me?’ the man asked. ‘Because we are the same,’ Prisoner 46664 replied.

As the story unfolded, I glanced around the pub. People stood, sat and leant forward, drinks forgotten. I noted the absorption of the faces surrounding me as emotions flickered across their faces. As the storyteller reached the end of his account his voice cracked. The storyteller ended his tale with the following words, ‘46664 was the number assigned to the great man himself, Nelson Mandela’. Without another word needing to be spoken there was a moment of shared silence. Tears prickled my eyes.

As I reflected on the social space the performance created it generated a number of thoughts. First, what a powerful medium story can be to evoke the emotions of listeners. Perhaps you have experienced this yourself; and if you have not, the presence of a full house, month after month in Edinburgh, indicates that storytelling is a tradition that speaks to people and brings them together. Second, storytelling creates a social space where personal stories are shared alongside tales of heroic quests or magical porridge pots.

Throughout this book we will explore the value of once upon a time through some research conducted by others, but mostly through research I organised with storytelling in secondary schools in the UK. Research which has wider global implications for understanding what story does to a room of people, such as how young people form spontaneous connections with story, particularly fairy tales, and how this connection to story informs connections with others in a shared storytelling space. Storytelling and fairy tales materialise in many guises: movies, music, plays, literature, live action role-playing games (LARPing), storytelling nights and TV series. My research narrows in on what you may think of as spoken, oral or traditional storytelling; that is, stories spoken from one person to an audience from memory. In true trickster style, what I mention specifically in connection to oral storytelling touches on many other forms of tale telling, television is just one narrative genre that makes use of fairy tales for inspiration. Take for example the TV series, Castle (2012),

I chose this example because an American comedy crime series, was not first show I thought of when listing the common appearance of fairy tales on television e.g. Grimm, Once Upon A Time, Supernatural, and so on. The variety of narrative genres that touch on fairy tales and storytelling illustrate the pervasive social aspects of story. The psychoanalytic analysis of fairy tales, particularly Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, focuses on our unconscious by utilising fairy tales to understand structures of the psyche: the human mind and the self. For instance, Von Frantz stated that,

In myths or legends, or any other more elaborate mythological material, we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through an overlay of cultural material. But in fairy tales there is much less specific conscious material, and therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly (1995, p. 1)

Bettelheim believed in the therapeutic use of stories. He proposed that children can figure out how to act based on mental experimentation through fantasy, ‘If our fear of being devoured takes the tangible form of a witch,’ argued Bettelheim (1991, p. 120), ‘it can be gotten rid of by burning her in the oven!’ Amusing as Bettelheim’s words are, and while I agree there are benefits to using story in therapeutic settings, I do not agree there are stable universal meanings to fairy tale elements just as there are no scientifically proven shared meanings to dream interpretation (despite what dream interpretation books would have you believe). This is because as humans we have unique experiences which shape our perspective of the world around us, including our interpretations of story. My research, which took traditional storytelling into schools to observe group discussion, illustrates this through the unpredictable way young people form connections to their own lives and other narrative forms. I observed that while we can form collective meanings in groups, not everyone sees or takes the same things from a story. Yes, sometimes we do, and … here comes the trickster again tripping us up … sometimes unexpected connections are made. This is just one of the reasons why researching and working with story is multifaceted, tricky, and wonderful.

This chapter sets the stage for discussing the social, emotional, behavioural and ultimately the educational aspects of storytelling throughout this book by defining the term ‘storytelling’ and positioning storytelling research within the global storytelling climate; summarising the key research that has been undertaken so far; and the current challenges facing storytelling such as commodification (for profit). This book aims to paint a picture, or more accurately a tale, of how young people relate their own lives and experiences to story; you can decide for yourselves whether it is a tall tale or not.

I took three storytellers into three schools to observe young people’s discussions following oral storytelling. I will explain my method in more detail in Chap. 2 (see The Storytelling Space). Despite the use of ‘storytelling’ as a term for multiple modes of narrative, traditional oral storytelling remains distinct owing to its immediate collective, lived experience. Defining storytelling is important to separate this book from a number of others which use “storytelling” in their titles such as The Storytelling Animal (Gottschall 2013) and Pixar Storytelling (Movshovitz 2017). These books are arguably more about narrative than stories told from memory. Narrative simply means, story. Any story you can think of. A tale like Little Red Riding Hood exists in various forms as a fairy tale, a poem, a film or music. Some researchers propose that narrative and story should be clearly separated. One way to think of this is that narrative is a way of structuring a story. As Wade Rawlins, the journalist said, ‘Narrative is the dirt path that leads us through the impenetrable forest, so we move forward and don’t feel lost.’ Storytelling then, involves a spoken way of structuring words when telling a story. Once upon a time … is the signal that the story has begun.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote an essay called The Storyteller. The essay is about writing but captures storytelling well if we imagine generations of people telling stories connected by narrative threads like a spider’s web.

One ties on to the next, as the great storytellers, particularly the Oriental ones, have always readily shown. In each of them there is a Scheherazade who thinks of a fresh story whenever her tale comes to a stop. (2006, p. 371)

In Arabian Nights , Scheherazade wove stories within stories every night to trick the king into sparing her life. By connecting storytelling to written literature, Benjamin illustrates there are different ways of communicating stories. At the same time Benjamin’s definition evokes the traditional use of the word storytelling: one that is romanticised and inspiring. In addition, Benjamin wrote that excellent writers—and the same could be applied to storytellers—capture the sensory aspects of life, and such stories are instructive about life. Thus written and told stories craft instructions for living around human experience. Or at...