The Storyteller

I'm a novelist and a blogger. Bloggers are a rather recent phenomenon. Believe it or not, the novel as a form hasn't been around all that long, either. There is some debate about when the first novel was published, but people have been telling stories for centuries, even thousands of years. My novel, In the Shadow of Mr. Lincoln, is about to hit store shelves, and an ancient storyteller makes a cameo appearance.

A seanchai (or shanachie, pronounced shan-a-shee) is an ancient Irish storyteller. The Irish in general are known for their blarney, but a seancahi is a class by himself. The word means "a bearer of lore," and before stories were written down, they were carried from village to village in the mind of the seanchi, delivered by rote, composed as long lyric poems and recited over mead and a meal.

The poems themselves were oral recordings of the important happenings of the clan. One seanchai passed his repertoire of myth, history, and legend down to the next. Most seanchai were "paid" by the clan's chieftain, but many of them were itinerant, traveling from village to village to share the stories of the Irish people. As I say in In the Shadow, the hearers paid the seanchai with food and ale, and "considered themselves richer for the bargain."

That is the hope of every author, isn't it? We want our words to leave the reader richer than he was before.