Fact-Checking the Torah -- Olrik meets SWLT

Narrators have to maintain their credibility with an audience thoroughly familiar with the sitz-im-leben of the narratives. There are several reasons for this.

One, of course, is that a narrative that survives long enough can survive the lifetimes of the actors in the narrative. They are no longer around to turn to for verification of the events; this is one of the defining features of oral narratives. Narratives also, obviously, may survive their original narrators. This was the status of some Israelite narratives by the time of the hilltop settlements.

Another reason is if the narrator can no longer tell exactly where something happened due to migration. It progresses from details of that horizon dropping out of the narrative, to complete loss of geographical data associated with the story. If the story has credibility problems at that point, some other form of “credibilizing” has to take place.

But the real issue requiring the narrator to work on credibility issues is fundamental to all oral narratives. They do not survive, they practically do not come into being, without containing fantastic elements. Olrik specifically states that between the everyday world of the opening, and the same everyday world of the closing, an oral narrative will always contain at least one incident that is not quite what happens in the everyday world. It is more or less fantastic. Such incidents, Olrik specifically states, mark the progress of the narrative toward its denouement.

So you will never find an oral narrative that survives multiple hops unless it has something in it that is out of the ordinary. This is the origin of Vera Cheberyak, at risk of having her apartment searched, keeping Andrey’s body there, rolled up in her own carpet, which she was about to sell to her landlord, for three days. This is why gossip flies. The fantastic is the fundamental constituent of urban legends and fish stories.  And it is the basis for all myths and fairy tales.

Narrators do things to maintain credibility while reciting these fantastic incidents. They use localization; they begin or end with a well-known geographical site which may be visible to the audience, as the place where the incidents occurred, because it has an association with the events in the narrative anyway.

They also use language cues. This is an issue of SWLT rule 2; grammar encodes nuances the bare words don’t express. What nuances?