The Storyteller

"Once Upon a Time..."

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One of the oldest archetypes and basically the seed from which This Very Wiki grows; a character that is noted for their ability to tell tales, or at least their propensity to do so.

Sometimes the tales have a purpose in the main plot, maybe even as a Framing Device. At other times it is simply an interesting side excursion, perhaps to give the setting a feeling of depth.

Sometimes overlaps with Miles Gloriosus and The Münchausen. Could conceivably be made to overlap with Intrepid Reporter. Possibly a reflection of Most Writers Are Writers. Compare with The Bard.

For the Jim Henson series, see here.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Dr. Stone: Ruri, the priestess of Ishigami Village, has the responsibility of remembering and reciting the "Hundred Stories" compiled by their ancestor Byakuya Ishigami more than 3000 years ago. Many of these include useful information about the natural world, but they also include a mashup of Momotarō and Fist of the North Star.
• John H. Watson from Moriarty the Patriot writes Sherlock's adventures under the pen name "Conan Doyle" in the series. Of course, much of the stories are fabrications agreed on with Sherlock, usually to keep the secrets of the mysteries Sherlock is actually pursuing, or to help Sherlock and William manipulate public perception of events in the direction they want.
• Jun Kudo from Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, especially a master of the Tear Jerker tales. Of course, we hardly ever get to hear any of his stories...

Comic Books

• Kitty Pryde in the classic X-Men issue "Kitty's Fairy Tale", made up a bedtime story for young Illyana Rasputin, casting herself as the heroine and other members of the X-Men as characters. Notably, Kitty cast Cyclops as a prince and Jean Grey as a princess cursed by the evil Phoenix, and gave the Scott and Jean in her story the Happy Ending their counterparts were denied.
• Green Lantern: Lyssa Drak of the Sinestro Corps loves to tell stories of her fellow corpsmen, as she is the keeper of the Book of Parallax.
• DC had a number of these in their horror anthology comics, who would introduce and close out every story. Among them were Cain in House of Mystery, Abel in House of Secrets, Lucien the Librarian in Tales of Ghost Castle, and Death himself in Weird War Tales.
• Star Wars Tales #19 had a story appropriately called "Storyteller". Far in the distant future, two young boys named Remoh and Otalp find the battered body of C-3PO. The droid entertains them with the tale of a hero named Luke Skywalker, who redeemed a darkened soul (Darth Vader) and freed the galaxy from the ultimate evil (Emperor Palpatine). Raiders come, destroy C-3PO, and murder Otalp. Remoh finds Luke Skywalker's lightsaber inside C-3PO's remains. Greatly inspired by the droid's tale, Remoh vows to free his people from the tyrants who rule them, declaring, "There is hope."
• Manny Monkton from Astro City, a comic book publisher. Too bad his Consummate Liar tendencies frequently get him in trouble.

Fan Works

• The title character of Songs Uncle Sings is an Old Soldier who often tells tales and sings songs about his days as a warrior.
• Marblehead from Pacific: World War II U.S. Navy Shipgirls does this as her favorite past time alongside telling bad jokes and puns.
• Telling Tales revolves around a traveling storyteller coming to Ponyville and exchanging ponified versions of famous folk tales ("The Mare's Choice", for example, borrows from the Wife of Bath's tale in The Canterbury Tales and the legends of King Arthur).
• As in canon, Varric Tethras is this in Skyhold Academy Yearbook. He writes a few stories as part of the series, including a rewrite of The Princess Bride with his colleagues in the various roles, and is also the school's writing teacher - meaning that he's teaching his students how to become this as well.
• Oogway's Little Owl: Taylor, somewhat unintentionally, becomes a very talented one of these upon entering the Kung Fu Panda world, and recounting stories from Earth Bet that no one had ever heard before, like The Princess Bride, The Beauty And The Beast, and (Po's favorite), Star Wars. Perhaps the crowning moment of this is when she recounts A Bug's Life to a city of oppressed insects, who use the lesson to rise up against the mice who'd been extorting them.

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Fairy Tales

• In The Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen, the thief saves the lives of his companions by claiming to have been in more danger than they were, and the knight gives him their lives, one by one, to get the stories. The last story recounts how he saved the life of a baby, and the knight's old nursemaid assures him that it's true and he was the baby.
  • Conal Yellowclaw has the same plot, though he is the father of the men he's saving.

Films — Animated

• In Tangled, Flynn offhandedly mentions that he used to read to the younger children in the orphanage. The film also opens and closes with narration in the form of Flynn telling the tale of how he and Rapunzel met.
• IN Kubo and the Two Strings, Kubo makes a living as a storyteller, enhancing his tales by using his magical shamisen to act the stories out with animated origami figures.
• The Breadwinner has Parvana's father, Nurallah, who uses his storytelling to teach her history. When he is taken to prison, Parvana takes up the mantle and tells a Story Within a Story to provide some much needed escapism and keep everyone's spirits, especially her own, up.
• Song of the Sea has the Great Seanchaí, whose name literally means "storyteller" in Irish, and he's the keeper of all stories related to the fairies of Ireland. Each of his incredibly long hairs contains a story, as he demonstrates when showing Ben a hair that has the story of Mac Lir being turned to stone.

Films — Live-Action

• Dilios, in 300, though according to the film's director Zack Snyder, he "knows how not to wreck a good story with truth."
• Ed Bloom, in Big Fish.
• Uncle Garth, in Secondhand Lions.
• In Peter Pan, this is one of the characteristics that makes Wendy attractive to Peter, and she is often shown telling stories to the younger children at various points in the film. The entire film is another story she's telling, possibly to her own children.
• The Grandfather character in The Princess Bride.
• C-3PO, relating the heroes' story to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, having come a long way from his comment way back in A New Hope.
  Threepio: I'm not much more than an interpreter, and not very good at telling stories. Well, not very good at making them interesting, anyways.
• The titular Darby O'Gill in Darby O'Gill and the Little People: he goes to the pub and tells tales of his dealings with Brian, King of the Leprechauns...all of them true.
• In Hercules (2014), Iolaus' main role in the group is to spread tales of Hercules' great deeds, though he greatly exaggerates to make Hercules seem like an even bigger badass than he already is. For example, after Hercules defeated a gang of bandits who wear serpent masks, Iolus claimed he defeated a many-headed serpent called the Hydra.
• Wonder Woman (2017): Etta Candy fondly tells stories to the audience about the characters in Wonder Woman in a few short sketches for the film's home video release, complete with some classical music, a scrap book and a fireplace.

Literature

• Scheherazade in Arabian Nights.
• Fflewddur Fflam in The Chronicles of Prydain, doing part-time as a Spoony Bard.
• Dandelion in Watership Down (among the main group, he told most of the stories of "the prince of a thousand enemies".)
  • Bluebell gets to tell one, as well. He's also telling a story to keep some of the other rabbits calm, during the climactic scene.
• Bilbo in The Lord of the Rings. Also Aragorn.
• Brom in Eragon is widely regarded as one of the greatest storytellers known.
• Puck in Puck of Pooks Hill by Rudyard Kipling.
  • Also the two Intrepid Merchants in Ballad of the King's Jest by the same author.
• The Belgariad: Belgarath the Sorcerer often plays the traveling storyteller when he's Walking the Earth. Since he has thousands of years of practice and was present for many of the events the stories are based on, he's very good.
  His stories were filled with sounds that made them come alive, and through the sounds and the words with which he wove the tales, sight and smell and the very feel of strange times and places seemed also to come to life for his spellbound listeners. All of this wonder he gave freely in exchange for a few meals, a few tankards of ale, and a warm spot in the hay barn in which to sleep.
• The Minstrel in The Last Hero, who is dragged along by the Silver Horde to chronicle their last great act of heroism. It is revealed at the end that he is only The Minstrel - no name other than that - and his entire purpose is to be the one that tells the tale. Despite his battered appearance by the end of it all, he seems to be a pretty good sport about the whole thing. Or else he has been driven insane by the ordeal and forgotten whatever name he had before.
• Taleswapper (aka William Blake) from the Alvin Maker series
• Magehunter, which is set in a Middle-Eastern-inspired world, has a storyteller named Al-Haddar as a Scheherazade stand-in. Notably, after you're done with a feast, Al-Haddar then narrates an important story to you, which serves as a Metafiction to your adventure.
• Chronicler from The Name of the Wind
• Thom Merrilin in The Wheel of Time.
• David Copperfield was this in his Boarding School of Horrors.
• In Terry Brooks's The Scions of Shannara, Par and Coll Ohmsford were acting as storytellers while trying to avoid capture.
• The title character in L. M. Montgomery's The Story Girl.
• Sara Crewe in A Little Princess, as well as all the adaptations thereof. Especially notable in the Alfonso Cuaron film and in the anime, where her narratives are shown in detail, and become an important plot point.
• The title character of The Book Thief, by Marcus Zuzak, finds she can calm people down by reading aloud to them during an air raid in World War II Dresden.
• Marianne Engel in The Gargoyle.
• The unnamed gentleman in the short story "The Storyteller" by H. H. Munro (better known as Saki).
• Colas Breugnon, the narrator and protagonist of the novel of the same title.
• Lori's mother Beth and Dimity herself provide the tales that are to be published in Aunt Dimity's Death. Lori herself has to recount some of them to establish her identity for Dimity's executor, Willis Sr.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, Old Nan is both the children's caretaker and the storyteller of Winterfell. She's particularly fond of telling scary stories about the Others.
• In Michael Flynn's The January Dancer, the harper sought out the scarred man to get him to tell her his stories, so she could write songs about them.
• In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, this is one of the things Bilbo remembers about Gandalf in the opening.
  Not the fellow who used to tell such wonderful tales at parties, about dragons and goblins and giants and the rescue of princesses and the unexpected luck of widows’ sons?
• Eva Luna from, well, Eva Luna is a protagonist version of this. Her talent for stories (inherited from her Missing Mom Consuelo) gets her out of poverty, solitude, and even death. And it allows her to meet her great love Rolf, the local Intrepid Reporter.
• In Alethea Kontis's Enchanted, Sunday goes into the forest to read stories to the talking frog. It helps him remember having been human.
• A series by Elizabeth Vaughan has Ezren Silvertongue, a storyteller by trade. In Dagger-Star, he was Made a Slave, and his cruel master cut off his tongue specifically because he was a storyteller, but the heroes save him and restore his tongue with a healing spell. A lot of Ezren's arcs involve him being insecure about storytelling being about his only talent as he is short, scrawny, and no warrior, unlike pretty much every other character. To his surprise, Bethral falls for him, partly because he is an amazing storyteller. In Destiny's Star, Ezren and Bethral live among the People of the Plains. Ezren at first fears that he will not be accepted, but discovers that the People of the Plains hold singers and storytellers in high regard.
• Ann Aguirre's Razorland Trilogy: Morrow serves as the storyteller for Company D. Eventually, he writes his stories down.
• Bastian from The Neverending Story enjoyed regaling a younger girl with his stories that he made up. When in Fantastica, this ability is vital to him as he is the only person, being human, who can create stories. Eventually creates a library containing all of his stories with a story of his.
• In the New Jedi Order novel Remnant, this is the role of the Shamed One I'pan, who both tells stories to entertain his fellow outcasts and also serves as a priest of the as-yet-inchoate Jedi Heresy, retelling the tales that will form the basis of the religion. Even Nom Anor, a spy, Manipulative Bastard, and all-around cynic, can't help but be impressed at how well I'pan works a crowd. Although I'pan is killed, he inspires Nom Anor to create the guise of Yu'shaa, the Prohpet, a charismatic figure who can spread the heresy further and wider than ever before.
• Orrec Caspro in Annals of the Western Shore. He develops the talent in the first book, Gifts, by making up extra "chapters" of his mother's many stories and epic poems. By Voices, he's renowned as a "maker" across the land and his storytelling figures heavily into the Ansul-Ald conflict. In Powers, he becomes a professor at Urdile's university, and his poem "Liberty" inspires many of the other slaves and runaways that Gav meets.
• Hoid, an Inexplicably Awesome recurring character in Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere, is a storyteller in many of his appearances, aided by his millennia of personal experience and his illusion magic. It's most notable in Warbreaker and The Stormlight Archive, where he uses his stories to nudge several major characters in the right direction.
  "[The story] means what you want it to mean. The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon."
• Flea, Cricket, and Orca in Sorrow's Knot by Erin Bow.
• The very basis of The Canterbury Tales. A diverse group of travellers tell each other stories to pass the time on their journey.
• Isaac Asimov:
• "The Callistan Menace": Stanley expects all of the crew to be able to tell him exciting stories about their adventures in the Solar System, but it's Mac Steeden that really enjoys stringing a tale together. He's acknowledged to have the best because he used to be crew for the legendary Captain Peewee Wilson.
• "Someday": The little computer Bard is designed to generate an infinite number of stories by combining all different fairytale elements.
• A Necklace of Fallen Stars: Kaela is a Rebellious Princess with a gift for telling tales. She jokes that it started with the wild excuses she gave to her father to explain why she was late for dinner.
• In Warrior Cats, Purdy is known for his love of telling stories - though whether cats willingly listen is up for debate. He's even been known to not stop after realizing that his audience has fallen asleep.
• In Fangs Of Kaath, Sandhri begins the novel as a storyteller on the streets of an Arabian city. It doesn't bring in much money, but she doesn't mind. The establishes her character as intelligent and sympathetic.

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Andrew, in Seasons 7 and 8, with him endeavoring to educate the Slayer Potentials. Played for Laughs due to him being a bit of a Cloud Cuckoo Lander at best and suffering the occasional Critical Research Failure in regards to the show's continuity.
• Game of Thrones: This is part of Old Nan's job. She has many stories for many situations.
• NUMB3RS : Interestingly enough Charlie Eppes, who constructs entertaining parables to illustrate math.
• Gabrielle in Xena: Warrior Princess had a fantastic flair for storytelling before she became a full-fledged Action Girl and even taught Homer a thing or two.
• The afore-mentioned short-lived Jim Henson series The Storyteller (unsurprisingly) featured one. He was credited just as "The storyteller" and his storytelling was the Framing Device for each episode. He was also the protagonist of one story.
• Stella from Barney & Friends.

Music

• Paul McCartney's lyrics (especially compared to other Beatles') are notable for often telling stories rather than pondering about abstract subjects. He's also a master storyteller during interviews. His age and career certainly help.

Radio

• The "Storyteller" sketches at the end of each episode of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme. Word of God is that Finnemore's Storyteller started out as a pastiche of an M. R. James ghost story narrator, and specifically Derek Jacobi's audiobook version, before widening out to include "a bit John Buchan, a bit H. G. Wells, and a bit R.L. Stevenson - in fact any of those writers between about 1885 and 1939 who wrote stories in which chaps who only ever refer to one another by their surnames are reluctantly persuaded by other chaps at the club to tell tall stories".

Religion and Mythology

• Older Than Feudalism: In The Bible, Jesus was known for illustrating religious points with parables.
• The Talmud has also has several examples.
• In Norse Mythology, Odin has charge over riddles and poetry and runes and the like.
• Anansi the Spider, who even challenged the gods (or Tiger, depending on the version you're reading) so that he would be considered King of All Stories.

Tabletop Games

• In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Galliards perform this role for the Garou Nation. Through singing and storytelling, Galliards preserve legends from Garou history.
  • Illyara, one of the six surviving Zmei (Wyrm dragons) collects stories of her siblings' achievements and shares them with anyone who asks.
• In Deadlands, after defeating a major evil, the characters can use the Persuasion skill to tell people the story of their deeds to try to reduce the level of fear among the local populace. This is important because fear strengthens the monsters and physically transforms the land to their benefit, and the Big Bads' ultimate plan is to spread enough fear to allow them to manifest in the human world. Characters can take an Edge (i.e. ability) called Tale Teller that makes them especially good at this.

Theatre

• The opening number of the musical Once Upon a Mattress is sung by the Minstrel, who tells the story of the Princess and the Pea and explains the true story of the event to his audience.
• In the Back Story of Othello, this is how Othello won Desdemona.
  Her father loved me, oft invited me,
  Still questioned me the story of my life
  From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
  That I have passed.
  I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
  To th' very moment that he bade me tell it,
  Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances,
  Of moving accidents by flood and field,
  Of hair-breadth ’scapes i' th' imminent deadly breach,
  Of being taken by the insolent foe
  And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
  And portance in my traveler’s history.
• Wendy in Peter Pan. The fact that she knows "lots of stories" is what makes Peter take her to Never Land in the first place, since the Lost Boys don't know any stories. In early drafts of the script, even the Indians listen in.

Video Games

• God of War (PS4): Mimir('s head) serves this purpose, as well as Mr. Exposition; while Kratos and Atreus make their way through Midgard and the various realms, Mimir tells them stories from Norse Mythology to flesh out the world for them and the players alike, most of which he personally witnessed. Of course, anyone familiar with Norse mythology will quickly realise that these versions aren't quite the ones written down in the prose edda...
• Kaguya Houraisan, the lunar princess of the Touhou Project saga is a proficient storyteller that entertains people during festivals.
  • But... In the past...
• Manari from the Samurai Shodown Spin-Off Nakoruru: Ano Kara no Okurimono. She's actually from a whole clan of these.
• Homeros in Fire Emblem: Thracia 776. His ending says he became a legend in Jugdral due to this.
• Vernon from Psychonauts claims on his Character Blog to be descended from storytellers all the way from caveman times, and he is a limitless warehouse of incredibly long and boring stories.
• Leliana in Dragon Age: Origins. Notably, the DLC Leliana's Song is framed somewhat as her telling the story of how she split from Marjolaine. One of her companions, Sketch, makes a cameo in the sequel and is apparently being chased as a result of the tale.
  Take my advice friend: stay away from storytellers. Never know what they'll say …
• Varric in Dragon Age II. The Framing Device of the whole game is Cassandra questioning him on the protagonist's time in Kirkwall, and his stories are half the reason the PC becomes a Memetic Badass even before the climax.
  Merrill: (teasing Varric) No shit, there I was-
• Lorewalker Cho from World of Warcraft fits beautifully into this character archetype, acting at first as a guide for the player in Pandaria's Jade Forest and thereafter telling the player stories of such figures as King Varian Wrynn and Vol'jin of the Darkspear in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. He also serves as the narrator for a short animated series by Blizzard, The Burdens of Shaohao.
• Lady Alvane, whose narration bookends The Longest Journey, plays the trope straight.
• The homeless drunk, Idiot Doom Spiral, from Disco Elysium enjoys telling you about his own personal journey from being a successful tech-billionaire to a drunken bum living on the street as well as various Urban Legends, provided you are willing to supply him with booze.
• In The Elder Scrolls: Legends, all of the story mode tales are framed as a man named Kellen telling stories to his companions.
• In Six Ages, Ekarna (goddess of trade and communication) is so good at telling stories that she can trade the experience for actual tangible items. She hails from a pre-medieval culture where most people are illiterate, so they carry their histories on metal "honor belts" and painstakingly woven story tents, where all the children of a clan are taught about their ancestors.
  "Rams slew us," said the ghosts. "So we like nothing better than a tale in which they are slain. We will give you the bones you seek."

Web Animation

• The titular character in Fallout Lore: The Storyteller is of course this, centering around adventures of a Powered Armor-clad wanderer, who has seemingly been spending decades traveling the wastes looking for stories and information to share, and is/was a member of the Brotherhood of Steel, but that's essentially all we know about him. ^note  Though oddly enough the first season didn't reveal him as the narrator till the very end of the season.

Webcomics

• Kalare from Gifts of Wandering Ice is a storyteller scientist who knows that her magical legends are not true but believes them to be important for developing creative type of thinking in her students.
• Theopholous Dumedd of Girl Genius makes up fantastic tales for the younger students that seem to end up including a whole bunch accidental truths.
• Koark from Order of Tales. The eponymous Order is devoted to telling and preserving tales; Koark is the last of their kind.
• Fuschia in Sinfest. When she leaves Hell, the damned notice that storytime is come and no story has.
• In Gunnerkrigg Court, Coyote casts Antimony as this.
  • Of course, considering that Antimony from some unspecified point in the future is the narrator of the comic, he may not totally wrong to do this.
• In Doc Rat, Flopsy to children.
• In Cucumber Quest, Princess Nautilus is delighted that she gets to tell Cucumber the stories.

Web Original

• Lenore (Fool's Hydreigon) in We Are All Pokémon Trainers. Her stories, while fun for her Pokémon audience, tend to turn towards clueless aesops.
• Appear very, very often in The Wanderer's Library. Almost every character has some degree of it.

Western Animation

• From Disney Fairies: Spinner in the books and Lyria in the movies are Story-Teller talent fairies.
• Gerald from Hey Arnold! tells a lot of Urban Legends. In one episode, Curly gets mad because he wants to tell the story of "The Ghost Bride" but everyone else won't let him since it's Gerald's job.
• Cherilee in the third generation of My Little Pony. The intro even spells it out for us: "I hope we hear a story from Cherilee!"
• This is Butch's entire shtick in Recess
• An episode of the X-Men animated series puts Jubilee in this role, recycling some elements from "Kitty's Fairy Tale". When she and a bunch of non-powered children are trapped in a cave, she cheers them up via telling them stories where she casts herself as an Action Girl, Gambit and Wolverine were her teammates, Professor Xavier was The Mentor, Magneto as the Evil Sorcerer, Cyclops as the Prince, Jean as the Princess...
• In The Brothers Grunt, the Poobah shares stories of the brothers' adventures and Grunt legends with the audience.
• The Simpsons:
  • Abe Simpson is fond of telling stories, although they tend to be rambling and nonsensical. Occasionally his stories are crucial to the plot, as in "The Curse of the Flying Hellfish", and it gets Lampshaded on "Lemon of Troy", when kids spontaneously gather around him when he appears out of nowhere to tell the story of the old lemon tree.
  • Homer appears to have inherited his father's gift for stories. Most of the Whole Episode Flashback episodes have him telling the kids stories of when he and Marge were younger.
  • The old hobo in "Simpsons Tall Tales", who regales the Simpsons with stories from American folklore.
• In Peter and the Magic Egg, Uncle Amos tells the story to the talking animals, even though they were there and should know more about it than Amos.
• Sydney from Ready Jet Go!. She loves to tell stories, the most famous example being when she told Jet about the legend of Lone Star in the episode of the same name.
• In Secrets of the Furious Five, Po calms down his first students- a rowdy class of children- by telling them stories about how their heroes exemplified the ideals of kung fu. This works not just because the stories themselves are interesting, but because Po has a friendly, approachable personality and a good idea of what the kids will want to hear about. It's implied that Po was once in their shoes, long ago.
  Po: (after narrating Master Viper's backstory) Now, I know what you're all thinking. Where's the kickin' butt?
  Children: Yeah!
• Leaders in the early Christian church as depicted by The Storykeepers are known as "storykeepers". They are called that since they share stories of the life of Jesus to converts. Many of whom (like the main character Ben) were able to meet Jesus themselves in person.
• Molly of Denali: Grandpa Nat loves telling stories to Molly, such as the raven who stole the sun.

Real Life

• Storytelling and Oral Tradition in general is historically extremely important in West African culture, to the point that one of the most iconic cultural characters from that area - Anansi - was known as the Keeper of Stories. Griots or djeli were professional traveling storytellers: revered figures in the community whose job was not only to collect stories, but to pass down all the history and culture of the places they visited. In older times (before the use of writing became widespread), they were even the official court records.
• Scottish clans will often have an official clan bard. In times past, this could be hereditary or perhaps a close relation of the chief. They would follow close behind the chief in battle to make sure the clan's glorious deeds were recorded. The clan's inglorious deeds were of course treated differently.

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