Exercise for a Storyteller #4: Re-invent History

There are many reasons history is recorded beyond simply keeping the record. Though we can’t go into all of them here, one touches directly upon a storyteller: certain people and events make their way into the historical record because they captured the hearts and minds of their contemporaries. Perhaps their story was particularly heroic or tragic. Perhaps it inspired something great or portended something catastrophic. Whatever the answer, there is a lot of material there for a storyteller to play around with.

As a teacher of medieval history, I have frequently been struck by the ways in which C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien wove some of that period’s key characters and events into their stories.

In The Chronicles of Narnia, Caspian the Conqueror is strangely reminiscent of the real-life William the Conqueror of England. Boromir’s death in The Lord of the Rings feels every bit as beautiful and tragic as the death of Roland, the legendary nephew of Charlemagne who also famously carried a horn with him into his battles. Of course, I have no idea if Lewis or Tolkien intentionally used these giants of medieval history in their stories, but the similarities are there nonetheless.

I frequently have my students write stories in connection to our history lessons. Those lessons combine storytelling lectures and primary source readings. Although I like to think that my lectures are extremely interesting, it’s the primary source documents that really get everyone’s attention.

Now, you may be thinking primary source documents sound far too difficult for a child. After all, most of us didn’t encounter them in a serious fashion until we got to college. But actually, with a little guidance from a teacher, kids of all ages can purposefully and effectively make use of such resources. Of course, the teacher needs to be the ultimate judge of how much to share with a child based on his maturity and stage of development. For example, it may make sense to focus on a single, significant sentence with a kindergartner, but an eighth grader can easily handle an entire document.  

As opposed to traditional textbooks, primary source documents put us directly in contact with the people we are studying because they were written by the people of the time. Better still, they tend to be a little “raw” and full of colorful details and authentic language. It’s this second quality that makes them so rich for a child storyteller.

Here is an example from my classroom of how we write stories from history:

When we learn about the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, I don’t just tell the story of how King Henry II Plantagenet indirectly called for his death in a fit of rage and how four of his knights complied with his wish. We also read the record of it by Gervase of Canterbury, a monk who knew St. Thomas.

Gervase gives a gripping account of how the king’s men, whom he calls “butchers,” arrived at Canterbury and came upon St. Thomas as he was preparing for Mass. He describes their “hatchets,” “axes,” “two-edged glaives,” and “swords.” He tells how St. Thomas commanded them to “Depart, hence!” but that the knights replied with “Strike! Strike!” St. Thomas bravely stood his ground as the knights “added wound to wound” and eventually “dashed out his brains.”

Reading Gervase’s account is more like reading a crime fiction novel than what most students usually think of as history. By the end of it, the murder of St. Thomas Becket is more than an abstraction from the past; it’s a real-life event that they can bear witness to. The students are then ready to reinvent the scene of his death through their own storytelling. Some of my students imagine they are St. Thomas. Others become an altar boy or some other hidden onlooker. Some even assume the persona of one of the henchmen. No matter the perspective, writing from the primary source document makes for a riveting story.

Over the years, some of the themes from St. Thomas Becket’s murder have popped up in other stories by my students. That’s because his story has become part of their “cauldron of story,” as Tolkien would call it. I think this very same thing must have happened with Tolkien and Lewis. They may not have been intentionally writing from history, but they had a lot of material in their cauldron to sample in their stories.

And just imagine all the new stories a child will be able to dish up when his own cauldron begins to simmer with tidbits from history!

Image Credit: Thomas Becket by John Carter, 1 July 1786, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London