Redo, Remake, Retell

Whether it’s a book you read being made into a movie, or a play you saw set in a different era, many of the stories we watch and hear today are retellings. But this creative pilfering of tales-gone-by isn’t a new thing: the human race has been remixing stories since the oral tradition began. Here at the Apple Seed, we’ve got a huge collection of traditional tales retold with a setting-swapping, gender-bending, or moral-changing twist. We’ll start off hearing from Sam about a family story that got enhanced in the telling, even over a few minutes. Then, we’ll be listening to a small collection of  altered traditional tales, from Ed Stivender, Ingrid Nixon, and Maynard Moose (the storytelling companion of Willy Claflin). Finally, the Apple Seed team tried an experiement: passing along a story (the Norwegian folktale "The Boy and the North Wind"), telephone-style, to show how tales can change with each retelling.