The tale, a short narrative of oral tradition having divine, human, and animal characters that often encounter marvelous, magical, and miraculous phenomena and objects, has not attracted much interest from classicists and medievalists, even though it was a popular genre in ancient and medieval cultures. Paradoxography, for instance, which is an important source of ancient tales focusing on the marvelous, ‘has not been treated kindly by modern critics. The standard literary histories scarcely mention it, and when scholars do have occasion to refer to the genre, they give it poor reviews’.¹ Along similar lines, Graham Anderson has remarked: ‘By so much as asking whether the ancient world had a Red Riding Hood […], we enter an area of cultural history which has been almost entirely forgotten or ignored’.² More than twenty years later, Anderson’s words are still valid, given that the first collected volume on the cultural history of ancient fairy tales appeared no earlier than 2021. Consequently, it will take some more time before the fairy and other tales of antiquity receive the research attention they deserve.³

Compared to ancient paradoxography, its Byzantine counterpart has not been studied at all, a fact that gives the wrong impression that the Byzantines did not appreciate paradoxography or that they did not produce any mirabilia.⁴ Byzantine frame narrative, on the other hand, has recently received some critical attention.⁵ The situation with the medieval Latin tradition, to mention a Western example, is even worse, since the entire literature is marginalized. As Jan Ziolkowski laments, despite its extremely large quantity, its quality, and its importance, ‘medieval Latin in comparison with the medieval vernacular literatures remains unappreciated’.⁶ Lastly, medieval Arabic tales, except for those belonging to the tradition of Arabian Nights and that of Kalīla wa Dimna,⁷ are also depreciated in modern Western scholarship.⁸

As for tale sources that have attracted scholarly interest, they have been treated as devoid of aesthetic value. For instance, the Apophthegmata Patrum, a popular source of early Christian tales that were circulating in different languages including Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, and Latin, have been characterized as a ‘material’ with ‘little literary artifice’.⁹ Apart from a few exceptions,¹⁰ the Byzantine tale collections par excellence – the miracle and edifying story collections – have been mostly treated as sources for the history of pilgrimage and monasticism and not as literary works.¹¹ Not surprisingly, beneficial stories are rarely studied from a literary perspective, since even specialists treat them in a derogatory manner.¹²

Turning to literary studies, we realize that, as for the current state of scholarship on modern and contemporary fiction,¹³ the novel is the main source for classical and medieval fiction studies. According to Tim Whitmarsh, the ancient novel has attracted so much interest in the last two or three decades because it ‘embodies the spirit of (post-) modernity better than any other ancient form’.¹⁴ A medievalist, Roberta Krueger, who is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, has similarly remarked that ‘medieval romance narratives astound the reader […]. These fictions continue to intrigue modern audiences […] by the diversity of their forms and subject matter, the complexity of their narrative strategies and perspectives, and the many critical responses they invite’.¹⁵ But, as the contents of this volume amply demonstrate, such statements are just as valid for ancient and later short fiction. Obviously, the exclusion of the tale from discussions on ancient and medieval fiction is quite problematic, as it creates a false understanding of the narrative forms and characteristics of these fictions.

The situation is not much different for later and modern short fiction. As Sarah Copland emphatically remarks, ‘with narrative theory embracing […] fields as diverse as medicine and law, and at the same time engaging with a much broader corpus of narrative “texts”, it has long puzzled me that no work has been published on the relationship between narrative theory and […] the short story’.¹⁶ The fact that there are no significant narrative theories devoted to the short story becomes even more puzzling when one thinks of the large production of short fiction, on the one hand, and of the short stories written by renowned authors, such as Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), Walter Scott (1771–1832), James Joyce (1882–1941), and Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), on the other. As the American author George Garrett (1929–2008) has put it, it is ‘strange that so many of our best writers coming along, in schools and out, do their best work in the short story form. Strange that the short story has not managed to capture and keep its rightful place’.¹⁷

In fact, there are a few theoretical works that are based on short fiction: Tzvetan Todorov’s study of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Roland Barthes’ analysis of “Sarrasine”.¹⁸ One could also mention the works of Vladimir Propp and Claude Bremond on the fairy tale.¹⁹ It must be pointed out, however, that these theorists’ use of short fiction has to do either with their structuralist methods’ easier applicability or their interest in folklore and not with any intention of developing a short fiction theory. In general, the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘fiction’ are reserved for the novel. This is not only because the novel is the dominant narrative genre, but also because most narratologists and theorists do not draw a distinction between the novel and the short story. For them, both short and long stories are narratives with the same features: a beginning, middle, and an end, characters, place, time, and events. Surprisingly, even the narratologists and critics who acknowledge the existence and even the importance of narrative forms other than the novel do not pay any serious attention to them. A case in point is Northop Frye, who, even though he notes that the identification of fiction with the novel is erroneous, does not undertake a systematic analysis of any short literary form.²⁰

Short narrative’s absence from modern narratology, despite its centrality to understanding fiction, prevents theorists from providing a more sufficient analysis of the workings of different forms of narratives. Based solely on the novel and its elements, narratologists examine the development of the beginning-middle-and-end plot, its characters, their perspectives and actions in time and space, in an attempt to figure out how the sequences of events determine the story’s form and structure. Of course, such plot-centered approaches are very useful and offer interesting insights into many novels, but they prove ineffective when it comes to short fiction.

Unlike the novel, short fiction mostly does not follow any integral laws about character, credibility, and plot structure. Anton Chekhov’s (1860–1904) short stories and those of his followers, for example, exhibit a randomness, inexplicability, and open-endedness that cancel all narrative rules detected by narratologists.²¹ In sum, short fiction cannot be theorized in the same way as long narratives such as the novel and biography that have a mimetic mode of temporal development. It is, therefore, essential to produce a new narratological theory that will be inspired by the particular nature of short fiction and will be used alongside the narrative theories deriving from the study of long fictions. A narratological theory emanating from short fiction could provide an invaluable tool for both narratologists and scholars studying short narrative forms, such as the early (Greek) tale (first–seventh century) that is the subject of the present volume.

By examining the early Greek tale, this volume not only provides the first systematic study of an important premodern genre, but also fills a gap in ancient and Byzantine narrative studies. The volume’s nine chapters are organized around three interconnected parts – “Tale Theory and Poetics”; “The Art of Storytelling”, and “Tales in Collections” – each consisting of three chapters. Part 1 constitutes a first attempt to provide a theoretical framework for the study of the early tale. In Chapter 1, with the title “The Art of Short Narrative: Toward a Theory of the Late Antique and Byzantine Tale”, Stavroula Constantinou develops a tale theory which revolves around the three interdependent constituents of the tale that determine its form, meaning, function, and power: the storyteller, (inter)storyness, and story-effect. Even though Constantinou’s examples derive mostly from early Byzantine hagiography, her tale theory could be used to analyze both earlier and later tales detected in different types of tale collections and texts.

In Chapter 2, entitled “Telling a Thauma in Hagiography and Paradoxography”, Christian Høgel deals with an essential characteristic of the early tale’s poetics: thauma, which in paradoxography is called ‘the marvelous’ while in hagiography it is named ‘the miraculous’. Whether representing the marvelous or the miraculous, thauma serves the same purposes: to evoke a sense of wonder due to the transgression of physical laws, the distinction between agent and source, and the suddenness with which it takes place; and to encourage readers and listeners to compare and evaluate its reality as a marvelous (in paradoxography) or miraculous (in hagiography) event.

In Chapter 3 (“To Render Unbelievable Tales Believable: The Storyworlds of Paradoxography”), Ingela Nilsson introduces the term ‘storyworld’ to refer to the material of the tales included in paradoxography. As Nilsson shows, the tales’ storyworlds have the power to make unbelievable phenomena believable. Despite their extreme brevity – or thanks to it – smaller tales incorporated into paradoxographical collections have whole storyworlds in which audiences are immersed. What makes these storyworlds attractive and thus believable is their worldedness – a combination of connections and similarities with the audiences’ actual world. It is through their worldedness that storyworlds become what Nilsson calls ‘possible worlds’, namely worlds that can be treated as acceptable by readers or listeners who share common rules of causality and verisimilitude.

Part 2 focuses on the storytelling act, examining the storyteller’s role, art, and impact on a tale’s audiences. In Chapter 4, entitled “Didactic Tales in Galen”, Sophia Xenophontos analyzes a particular kind of storyteller and his workings: the medical author and practitioner as personified by the most significant and influential author-physician of antiquity, Galen of Pergamum (ad 129–c.216), who was also an important philosopher of his times. Using both his medical and philosophical knowledge, Galen emerges as a unique and highly original storyteller. Galen’s didactic tales, which are an integral part of his innumerable writings, are specially designed to achieve two important aims: to strengthen the storyteller’s authority in the fields of medicine and practical ethics; and to have a great didactic and emotional impact upon his audiences whose perspectives and expectations are met. Galen’s authority as a storyteller and his works’ effects are also achieved through a sequence of storytelling strategies, transforming his otherwise technical and scientific texts into influential and appealing works.

In Chapter 5, with the title “Repetition and the Storyteller’s Profile in Early Byzantine Tale Collections”, Constantinou and Andria Andreou discuss how the use of rhetorical and narrative devices such as repetition may determine the storyteller’s profile, thus proving once again the strong interconnection between storytelling and storyness as defined in Chapter 1. Examining tales incorporated into early Byzantine anthologies covering a period from the fifth to the seventh century, the chapter’s authors detect three different storytelling profiles that emerge through the employment of triple repetitions, both on a stylistic and a narrative level. These are the holy, the chosen, and the repentant storyteller. Contrary to the general idea that repetition is boring and unoriginal, Constantinou and Andreou show that repetition creates storytellers and tales that are fresh, exciting, and original.

The audience’s wonder as the result of the storyteller’s art and storyness might also be associated with what Nicolò Sassi calls the ‘technology of enchantment’ (Chapter 6: “Circulation of Hagiographical Tales along the Incense Route: Storytelling as Technology of Enchantment”). According to Sassi, the technology of enchantment is related to the ways in which hagiographical tales, which travel along the Incense Route, are adapted and readapted to connect the worldly with the otherworldly, inviting their audiences to approach life as a reality inhabited by the sacred. These enchanting – or wonder-ful, we might say – tales transformed the audiences’ vision and experience of the world, rendering their daily spaces enchanted. The shrine of Menas and the city of Lydda, for instance, were perceived not as intermediary stops on a traveler’s way from one place to another, but as sacred spaces where the inaccessible divine became accessible.

The volume’s last part concentrates on tales in collections, as anthologies are the most common and rich sources of early tales. Focusing on the stylistic device of the catalogue in paradoxography and early Byzantine hagiography, Julia Doroszewska, the author of Chapter 7 (“Stunning with a List, Dazzling with a Catalogue: The Form of Paradoxographical and Christian Miracle Collections Revisited”), illustrates the device’s imaginative employment and its authorial implications. Doroszewska, whose approach is inspired by Umberto Eco’s book La vertigine della lista (The Infinity of Lists, 2009), shows how paradoxographers and hagiographers use the catalogue to achieve a threefold purpose: to present marvelous and miraculous phenomena; to organize the rich and infinite contents of their collective works; and to bring their audiences closer to the essence of the marvelous and the miraculous. Following Eco, Doroszewska suggests that the dizziness produced by the catalogue and its repeated employment constitutes a symptom of anxiety before innumerable facts that authors are unable to reduce to a common denominator. At the same time, such a plain thing as the catalogue is endowed with an immense and startling power that renders both a collection and its individual tales enchanting.

According to Chapter 8 (“(Auto)biographical, Marvelous, and Supernatural Stories in Early Byzantine Hagiographical Anthologies”), the primary structural unit of the tale is the episode that is initiated and driven forward by the story’s agent, who is also responsible for a tale’s form and general structure. As Constantinou and Andreou show, three important types of agents include the human, the marvelous, and the supernatural agent. These agents create, in turn, the three corresponding tale categories that are included in early Byzantine collections: the (auto)biographical, the marvelous, and the supernatural tale. Each tale category might have one of the following structures: single-episode, multiple-episode, or frame structure.

As the last chapter of the volume, Chapter 9 (“Space in Edifying Stories: The Case of Anastasios Sinaites”), reminds us, however, there are also other elements that might be important in a particular tale or collection of tales. One such element is space, which, even though it is not expected to play a role in narratives that are short and dense – normally space is essential in long narratives – might have a number of functions, and thus significantly contribute to the overall effect of a tale or tale collection. Markéta Kulhánková unearths the construction and uses of space in Anastasios Sinaites’ (c.630–701) first collection of tales. She suggests that the uniqueness of this work lies in the ways in which the author manipulates space, both on the micro level of individual tales and on the macro level of the tales’ arrangement in the collection.

Far from being exhaustive, this volume nonetheless makes a case for the marginalized genre of the Greek tale, offering significant tools for approaching it. The volume’s chapters analyze important elements that exist for the sake of the tale: its origin and circulation through telling and retelling, its forms and characteristics, and its power and impact. By providing a first theoretical framework for the study of the tale and by examining comparatively works that have not been considered (together) before, the volume contributors have created new knowledge in the fields of Classics, Byzantine Studies, and Literary Studies, which may prove useful for other disciplines, such as Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Folklore Studies, and Cognitive Studies.

All in all, this is an interdisciplinary, comparative, connected, and collaborative volume aiming to promote the establishment of the tale as an important literary form that needs to be moved from the margins into the center of ancient and Byzantine literary studies. In fact, more critical approaches to the early tale will allow a holistic understanding of ancient and Byzantine narrative literature, which now is only partial, as thus far scholars have almost exclusively studied the long narrative forms. Hopefully, the volume will initiate a number of other studies through which the importance of the old tale will be further established. Such projects concern the study of the later Byzantine tale and that of other medieval traditions (e.g., Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Slavic, and Western vernacular literary production) that could also be comparatively examined. The establishment of the cultural and critical history of the premodern tale will prove useful also for scholars of contemporary short fictions – particularly short story scholars who consider Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) as the originator of the genre.²²