Storytelling: Art and Technique: Art and Technique, Third Edition
by Ellin Greene
In 1944 a group of children’s librarians at the New York Public Library listened to a small, quiet, unassuming woman tell “East of the Sun and West of the Moon.” The story came alive as this master storyteller used only her lovely voice, perfect timing, and unobtrusive, spontaneous gestures to tell the tale. The storyteller was Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen.
Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen was born on April 8, 1873, in Trondheim, located on one of Norway’s beautiful fjords. When she was four years old the family moved to Bergen, Norway’s chief seaport, where she saw ships of many countries and listened to the sailors’ tales from other lands. Her grandmother read to her and to the other children in the family and told them stories about the great Norse heroes and about trolls and nissen.
Some Santa researchers associate Santa with the Norse "god" of Odin or Woden. Crichton describes Odin as riding through the sky on an eight-legged, white horse name Sleipnir. (Santa originally had eight reindeers, Rudolph was nine). Odin lived in Valhalla (the North) and had a long white beard. Odin would fly through the sky during the winter solstice (December 21-25) rewarding the good children and punishing the naughty. (Crichton, Robin. Who is Santa Claus? The Truth Behind a Living Legend. Bath: The Bath Press, 1987, pp. 55-56)
Mythologist Helene Adeline Guerber presents a very convincing case tracing Santa to the Norse god Thor in Myths of Northern Lands:Thor was the god of the peasants and the common people. He was represented as an elderly man, jovial and friendly, of heavy build, with a long white beard. His element was the fire, his color red. The rumble and roar of thunder were said to be caused by the rolling of his chariot, for he alone among the gods never rode on horseback but drove in a chariot drawn by two white goats (called Cracker and Gnasher). He was fighting the giants of ice and snow, and thus became the Yule-god. He was said to live in the "Northland" where he had his palace among icebergs. By our pagan forefathers he was considered as the cheerful and friendly god, never harming the humans but rather helping and protecting them. The fireplace in every home was especially sacred to him, and he was said to come down through the chimney into his element, the fire. (Guerber, H.A. Myths of Northern Lands. New York: American Book Company, 1895, p. 61)
The unusual and common characteristics of Santa and Thor are too close to ignore.
• An elderly man, jovial and friendly and of heavy build.
• With a long white beard.
• His element was the fire and his color red.
• Drove a chariot drawn by two white goats, named called Cracker and Gnasher.
• He was the Yule-god. (Yule is Christmas time).
• He lived in the Northland (North Pole).
• He was considered the cheerful and friendly god.
• He was benevolent to humans.
• The fireplace was especially sacred to him.
• He came down through the chimney into his element, the fire.
Even today in Sweden, Thor represents Santa Claus. The book, The Story of the Christmas Symbols, records:Swedish children wait eagerly for Jultomten, a gnome whose sleigh is drawn by the Julbocker, the goats of the thunder god Thor. With his red suit and cap, and a bulging sack on his back, he looks much like the American Santa Claus. (Barth, Edna. Holly, Reindeer, and Colored Lights, The Story of the Christmas Symbols. New York: Clarion Books, 1971, p. 49)
Thor was probably history’s most celebrated and worshipped pagan god. His widespread influence is particularly obvious in the fifth day of the week, which is named after him – Thursday (a.k.a. Thor’s Day).
It is ironic that Thor’s symbol was a hammer. A hammer is also the symbolic tool of the carpenter – Santa Claus. It is also worth mentioning that Thor’s helpers were elves and like Santa’s elves, Thor’s elves were skilled craftsman. It was the elves who created Thor’s magic hammer.
In the Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs, author Francis Weiser traces the origin of Santa to Thor: "Behind the name Santa Claus actually stands the figure of the pagan Germanic god Thor." (Weiser, Francis X. Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1952, p. 113)
After listing some the common attributes of Thor and Santa, Weiser concludes:Here, [Thor] then, is the true origin of our "Santa Claus." ... With the Christian saint whose name he still bears, however, this Santa Claus has really nothing to do. (Weiser, Francis X. Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1952, p. 114)
Another interesting trait of Thor is recorded by H.R. Ellis Davidson in Scandinavian Mythology, "It was Thor who in the last days of heathenism was regarded as the chief antagonist of Christ." (Davidson, H.R. Ellis. Scandinavian Mythology. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1982, p. 133) In case you are not aware, an "antagonist" is an enemy, adversary or replacement.
The bizarre and mutual attributes of Thor and Santa are no accident.
-- Santa Claus: The Great Imposter, by Dr. Terry Watkins, Th.D.
Gudrun’s mother, Fredrikke Nielsen, was an actress, famous for her portrayal of the women in Henrik Ibsen’s plays. The home Gudrun grew up in was an exciting place, frequented by musicians, poets, and writers, and alive with amateur theatricals, singing, and storytelling in which the entire family took part. It is little wonder that she grew up to love literature, to understand the strength and power of words, and to scorn careless speech.
When Gudrun was 15 years old, she came to Chicago to live with her mother’s sister. There she trained to be a teacher at the Cook County Normal School and came under the influence of Colonel Francis W. Parker, whom John Dewey called “the father of progressive education.” In 1893, she married Georg Thorne-Thomsen and the young couple made their home in Chicago.
Gudrun joined the staff of Colonel Parker’s new school. Parker’s innovative ideas in education attracted the attention of William Rainey Harper, then president of the University of Chicago. Harper invited Parker to bring his school to the university as part of the newly formed School of Education and to become director of the Laboratory Elementary School. John Dewey, already at the university as head of the Elementary School of the Department of Pedagogy, was appointed head of the Laboratory High School. The laboratory schools were Froebel-inspired, and storytelling was prominent in the curriculum. Harper, active in the Chautauqua movement and a storyteller himself, strongly supported the 1901 appointment of Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen to the faculty of the university as teacher of third grade in the elementary school, critic teacher and instructor in the School of Education. She taught courses in oral reading, history, and literature for lower grades; reading in primary grades; children’s literature; and storytelling.
During 1908-1909 Thorne-Thomsen was on leave from the University of Chicago to serve as a storyteller in branch libraries opened by the Chicago Public Library in park recreation buildings. These programs were jointly sponsored by the Chicago Public Library, the Chicago Association of Collegiate Alumnae, and the Chicago Woman’s Club. The program was so successful that story hours became a regular part of the library’s service to children. Thorne-Thomsen began retelling the old Norse folktales for children, and out of this came her first book, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, in 1912.
Her reputation as a gifted storyteller grew and Thorne-Thomsen was invited to lecture on storytelling throughout the Midwest, California, Oregon, and Hawaii. She annually lectured on storytelling and folklore at the Western Reserve Library School and the Carnegie Library School of Pittsburgh. In 1923 she and her husband joined the faculty of the Ojai Valley School near Santa Barbara, California, and she became the school’s first principal.
Soon after her husband’s death in 1936, Thorne-Thomsen retired as principal and launched a new career both as a visiting storyteller and as a recording artist for the Library of Congress and, later, for the Victor Company. Two books, The Sky Bed and In Norway, followed in the 1940s. In 1953 she was still training librarians in the art of storytelling in formal workshops and at informal gatherings.
“Perhaps the most wonderful thing of all,” one of her students of that period reported, “was to make us feel that we could tell stories too; that it was not some difficult art to be mastered by only a few gifted individuals, but the rightful heritage of us all and a source of great joy.”5
She died in 1956, but not before she knew – and took joy in the knowledge – that she would be honored with a day of storytelling at the storytelling festival to be held in Miami Beach during the 1956 American Library Association conference. “You librarians who work with children,” she wrote in acknowledgement of the honor, “I congratulate you on keeping alive the art of storytelling.”6
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7: The German Millennium, [Excerpt] from The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology: The Arisophists of Austria and Germany, 1890-1935, by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
FRITZ SAXL, the German historian of Renaissance ideas, was an early observer of the renewed interest in fortune-telling at the beginning of the twentieth century. He dated its origins to around 1910, while noting that a number of periodicals devoted to astrology sprang up over the next decade in Germany, accompanied by textbooks, prophecies and reprints of astrological classics. In due course palmistry, numerology, cabbalism and tarot supplemented astrology to form the principal scientific bases of a popular divinatory movement which grew prodigiously in the 1920s....He considered its modern manifestation to be one of the omens of the First World War.
[Guido von] List's prophecies were addressed collectively to the German nation and appeared to fulfil a similar function to individual fortune-telling. He foretold that an age of universal prosperity was approaching to alleviate the tribulations of German nationalists in Central Europe... The prophecy of a happy national future complemented his nostalgia for a lost golden age inasmuch as it denoted the restoration of his imaginary traditional world. Past and future represented the twin poles of a counter-ideal in time generated by a profound disenchantment with the present; the secret Armanist heritage throughout the allegedly benighted Christian epoch formed a bridge between these two ideal ages; such Armanist survivals were both the relics of the old dispensation and the heralds of the new order....
[Guido von] List's cyclical vision of time was derived from his three sources of theological inspiration: the holy world of Nature, Norse mythology and modern theosophy. It has already been shown how the elementary content of Armanist doctrine focused upon the 'laws of nature', which ostensibly determined the periodicity of all planetary and organic cycles in the cosmos. List frequently invoked these cosmic rhythms in his early pieces on national landscape: that their sustaining laws assumed the status of a divine principle in his later writings testifies to his belief in cyclical time. Secondly, one must consider the import of Norse myths in this respect. List's references to the Fimbulwinter and the Gotterdammerung suggest that he was familiar with those pagan legends, according to which there came a mighty winter after which the whole earth was consumed by fire and flood before rising anew, 'fertile, green and fair as never before, cleansed of all its sufferings and evil'. According to these myths, the cycle of destruction and creation was repeated indefinitely. Lastly, List's adoption of theosophy with its cosmic rounds, and the individual's successive reincarnation in each round, served to confirm his conviction in the recurrence of all things...
Both Jewish and Christian apocalypses distinguish themselves from other forms of prophecy by asserting an absolute and qualitative difference between the present age and the future. This dualistic and linear time scheme is represented by the juxtaposition of a pessimistic view of the present with a fantastic and joyful image of the future. The present age is devalued by a depressing account of the hardships and misfortunes that have befallen the people. The apocalyptic writer often indicates that the world is subject to an increasing physical and moral degeneration: mundus iam senescit. These complaints can extend to the charge that the world is under the dominion of Satan or other evil powers. At a point in the narrative coincident with the time of the apocalypse's composition, this historical survey gives way to prophecy proper. It is predicted that the former ills will be exacerbated by yet worse adversities. There will be signs of an ultimate catastrophe, such as violent climatic changes, drought, earthquakes and fire. Finally the evil spirit of this first age may appear as a dragon or other beast to torment mankind. The end of this age approaches as these so-called 'messianic woes' become increasingly intolerable. A divine warrior-leader will suddenly intervene to liberate his chosen people from their affliction. This messiah will bind or destroy the evil tyrant before establishing his own divine and incorruptible kingdom on earth. These acts initiate a new second age, when the joyful elect of the redeemed will know no suffering nor want; this new world will not be subject to the ordinary laws of nature and physical limitation; happiness and good fortune will reign eternally...
List echoed traditional apocalyptic by expressing extreme pessimism about many aspects of modern Austrian society. His concern was greatest with regard to the nationality question. The status of German language and culture in Austria had been increasingly challenged by the Slavs of the empire over the preceding decades... List fulminated against the clerical and socialist parties that favoured Slav interests and, drawing on the contemporary slogans of the Schonererite Pan-German and Los von Rom movements, he denounced the national outrage of Czech priests being appointed to German parishes in the ethnic borderlands and decried the preponderance of Slav civil servants in the bureaucracy.
His critique of contemporary Austria also embraced wider social and economic issues. He bemoaned the current economic tendencies towards laissez-faire capitalism and large-scale enterprise, because they undermined the existence of artisans, craftsmen and small middleclass entrepreneurs. He complained that commerce had lost its former ethical code and regarded the decline of the guilds as the collapse of the 'bastions of the burgher-world'... He condemned all finance as usury and indulged in period anti-Semitic sentiments culled from the newspapers of Georg von Schonerer and Aurelius Polzer...
List was no less pessimistic concerning modern political and cultural tendencies. A staunch defender of the monarchical principle and the Habsburg dynasty, he denounced all popular and democratic institutions of representation. Parliamentarianism was pure nonsense since it was based on the premiss that a majority of votes, however well or ill informed, should determine policy. Contemporary cultural movements were condemned likewise: feminism testified to the worthlessness of the age; modern painting (the Seccessionists) represented the rape of German art; theatre was dominated by foreign and Jewish patrons...
Following the idiom of other contemporary volkisch writers, List regarded the rural peasantry as the physical guarantors of a healthy nation. As a result of urban migration in the late nineteenth century, this peasantry was decreasing. List visited abandoned and depopulated farmsteads in Lower Austria, forming a dismal opinion of their wider implications... This physical decay of the nation was accompanied by moral degeneration...
It is evident that List's description of contemporary Austria amounted to a fundamental devaluation of the present. The entire industrial-urban complex together with its emergent social and political institutions was utterly condemned. List followed the apocalyptic model even further by claiming that this situation was due to the dominion of evil powers. The dissolution of traditional social practices and institutions posited, in List's view, a simpler and more conscious agent of change than the play of market forces, social circumstances, and structural changes of the economy. List sought a more concrete personification of these widespread socio-economic transformations in the monolithic conspiracy of the Great International Party...Its origins could be detected in the Christian conspiracy against the old Ario-Germanic hierarchy. In the present the wiles of the Great International Party could be discerned in the financial institutions, the political parties and their neglect of German national interests, and in the advocates of emancipation, reform and international co-operation...The Great International Party was the satanic incarnation of the present age, intangible yet monstrous and malevolent.
In the face of this oppression List began to search for the signs of national salvation in accordance with the traditional apocalyptic model. He devised several theories to prove that these signs were already evident by borrowing chronological notions from Hindu cosmology and Western astrology. By 1910 he had developed an interest in cosmic cycles following their theosophical popularization as rounds. These speculations concerning the regular creation and destruction of all organisms within the cosmos enabled List to invoke apocalyptic hopes by positing the end of a cycle close in time to his own day: the start of another cycle corresponded to the advent of a new age. List indulged in abstruse calculations based on Blavatsky's figures concerning the cycles, in order to conclude that a significant cycle had terminated in 1897. A further quarry of apocalyptic calculation was found in the materials of the contemporary German astrological revival amongst theosophists. Blavatsky had already referred to the solar or sidereal year, which was the time taken by the planets to take up their original alignment in the next house of the zodiac. She defined this period as c.25,868 terrestrial years. List quoted this very figure and thus derived the sidereal season, which 12.sted c.6,467 terrestrial years... Within this astrological framework of speculation, the 'messianic woes' appeared as the cosmically determined heralds of redemption.
Another sign, which gave List cause for messianic optimism, was his receipt of a letter in November 1911 from an individual calling himself Tarnhari. This man, whose name literally meant 'the hidden lord', claimed to be descended from the ancient tribe of the Wolsungen. This mysterious emissary from the distant past assured List that his rediscoveries concerning the Ario-Germanic past tallied with his own ancestral-clairvoyant memories. Tarnhari also confirmed the existence of the Armanenschaft: he claimed that he had been earlier reincarnated as a leading priest- king of the old elite. Although Tarnhari primarily vindicated the past pole of his fantasy, List regarded the appearance of this reincarnated chieftain as a good omen of imminent national redemption on the future pole...
These various signs indicated the imminent destruction of the satanic antagonist. List demanded the annihilation of the Great International Party in order that the Ario-Germans could enter the promised land of happiness and prosperity. In 1911 he voiced a prophecy of millenarian combat, which strangely anticipated the naval and military hostilities of the First World War:
Yes, the Ario-German-Austrian battleships shall once more send sparks flying, Donar's lightning shall once more shoot sizzling from the giant guns of our dreadnoughts, our national armies shall once more storm southwards and westwards to smash the enemy and create order]
These battles are consistent with the apocalyptic model. An enormous revolt, redolent of the twilight of the gods or the barbarian migrations, will smash the infernal enemy to create a righteous and pan-German order...
The outbreak of the First World War was greeted with jubilation in all belligerent countries. Some historians have suggested that this popular response evidenced a widespread desire for novelty after several seemingly stagnant decades. Others have noted a burgeoning imperialism coupled with the wish for distraction from pressing social reforms. In Germany there flourished the 'Ideas of 1914', an intellectual formulation of the general feeling of relief that national unity had overcome social division in the face of a foreign enemy. The pre-war cultural pessimists identified the former national ills with the insidious influence of the western democracies, which were now to be vanquished by the sword. It is against this euphoric reaction that List's apocalyptic attitude to the war must be understood.
In April 1915 List convened a meeting of the HAO [High Armanen-Order] in Vienna. He delivered an Easter oration in which he welcomed the war as the onset of a millenarian struggle that would usher in the new age. He warned that this age of transition would initially witness a sharpening of adversity, 'frightful outrages and maddening torments'. But these trials would eventually separate the good from the bad for all time, since all true Germans 'were preparing a new age, in which nothing pertaining to the old age could survive unless it was Armanist in nature'...
This positive attitude towards suffering prompts its comparison with a phenomenon that Michael Barkun has defined as the 'disaster utopia'. Barkun observes the ambiguity of disaster which, while obviously subjecting people to deprivation, can also produce unusual feelings of well-being. He notes that disasters often induce a temporary sense of common purpose and that 'invidious social distinctions disappear in a suddenly opened and democratized atmosphere'. This evaluation accords well with the euphoria implicit in the 'Ideas of 1914', and also illuminates List's enthusiasm for the actual hardships of war. Because a belief in the millennium often assumes the occurrence of disasters that precede the epiphany, the sense of fellowship in the midst of actual disasters can appear to confirm the millenarian expectations. For List, suffering augured salvation.
How did List actually envisage this collective salvation? For his descriptions of the millennium he tended to make use of mythological materials drawn from medieval German apocalyptic, Norse legends, and modern theosophy in order to convey its fantastic nature. He related the medieval tale of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa who lay sleeping inside the Kyffhauser mountain. Once he awakened, Barbarossa would unleash a wave of Teutonic fury across the world prior to the establishment of German hegemony. This tale owed its inspiration to a complex of medieval millenarian hopes which had originally crystallized around the Hohenstauffen emperors in the thirteenth century. Owing to a variety of historical and cultural circumstances, these hopes later lit upon the Habsburg emperors Frederick IV and Maximilian I in the fifteenth century. One millenarian tract of the period entitled Gamaleon had told of a future German emperor who was to overthrow the French monarchy and the Papacy. The Church of Rome would be expropriated and all its clergy exterminated. Once their oppressors had been vanquished, the Germans would be exalted over all other peoples. In place of the Pope a new German patriarch at Mainz would preside over a new Church subordinate to the emperor, a new Frederick, whose dominion would embrace the entire earth.
List's own vision of the Armanist millennium owed much to this mixture of crude early nationalism with the tradition of popular eschatology. As in those early modern manifestoes one finds the same belief in a primitive German world in which the divine will was once realized and which had been the source of all good until it was undermined by a conspiracy of inferior, non-Germanic peoples, the Church, the capitalists, the Jews, the liberals, or whatever. This ideal world would be restored by a new aristocracy under a God-sent saviour who would fulfil the religious and political expectations of the oppressed. List drew upon the traditions of this obscure historical chiliasm by claiming that the reigns of Frederick IV and Maximilian I betokened a renaissance of the Armanist spirit, the thrust of which had been sadly aborted by the conspiratorial Lutheran Reformation. It is further significant that List was attracted to the ideas of Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century philosopher and heretic. Bruno had proclaimed that Judaism and Christianity had corrupted the ancient and true religion, by which he meant the mysticism and the magic of the Egyptian Hermetica, which had enjoyed considerable popularity amongst the Neoplatonists of the Renaissance. Bruno also wanted a new dispensation based on the rediscovered ancient gnosis. This conjunction of millenarian hopes and cabbalistic thought also appeared in List's vision of the new Germany. With great approval he quoted Bruno: 'O Jove, let the Germans realise their own strength ... and they will not be men, but gods'.
A particular Norse legend offered another vision of the millenium which is important for this analysis. As early as 1891, List had discovered a verse of the 'Voluspa' which invoked an awesome and benevolent messianic figure:
A wealthy man joins the circle of counsellors, A Strong One from Above ends the faction, He settles everything with fair decisions, Whatever he ordains shall endure for ever.
This Starke von Oben (Strong One from Above) became a stock phrase in all List's subsequent references to the millennium. An ostensibly superhuman individual would end all human factions and confusion with the establishment of an eternal order. This divine dictator possessed particular appeal for those who lamented the uncertain nature of industrial society. List eagerly anticipated the advent of this leader, whose monolithic world of certainties would fulfil the sociopolitical conditions of his national millennium.
Lastly, theosophy offered an occult vision of the millennium. Towards the end of the war, List suggested that the Austrian and German victims of the slaughter on the battle-fronts would be reincarnated as a collective messianic body. He applied the principle of karma to claim that the hundred thousands of war-dead would be reborn with innate millenarian fervour: these young men would then form the elite messianic corps in a later post-war national revolution. From his calculations based on 'cosmic and astrological laws', List deduced that the years 1914, 1923 and 1932 had an intimate relation with the coming Armanist millennium. He favoured the year 1932 as the time when a divine force would possess the collective unconsciousness of the German people. This generation of resurrected revolutionaries would become sensitive to the divine force and constitute a fanatic league which would usher in the new age. Order, national revenge, and fervour would then transform modern pluralist society into a monolithic, eternal, and incorruptible state. This totalitarian vision was List's blueprint for the future Greater Germanic Reich. In his anticipation of Nazi Germany, his calculation was only one year out.