The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales [antikvár]

In the place where the storyteller was the coming of night was marked as it was not in towns nor in modern houses. It was so marked that it created in the mind a different rhythm. There had been a rhythm of the day and now there was a rhythm of the night. . . . The storyteller seated on a roughly made chair on a clay floor did not look unusually intelligent or sensitive. He certainly did not look histrionic. What was in his face showed that he was ready to respond to and make articulate the rhythm of the night. He was a storyteller because he was attuned to this rhythm and had in his memory the often repeated incidents that would fit it. . . . These notions were in the present writer's mind once upon a time when he sat in a cottage where the traditon of storytelling was still in being. A rhyihm that was compulsive, fitted to daily tasks, waned, and a rhythm that was acquiescent, fitted to wishes, took its place. But when the distinction between day and night could be passed over as it could be in towns and in modern houses the change of rhythnl that came with the passing of day into night ceased to be marked. This happened when light was prolonged until it was time to turn to sleep. The prolongation of light meant the cessation of traditional stories in European cottages. And when the cottages took in American kerosene or paraffin there was prolongation. Then came lamps with full and steady light, lamps that gave real illumination. Told under this illumination the traditional stories ceased to be appropriate because the rhythm that gave them meaning was weakened. Other things happened to put traditional stories out of date. Young people went to schools and learned to read. The world vii