Encounter at the Inn (Part 1)

What constitutes a story? At its simplest, it is but a telling of a tale in some kind of order, not necessarily chronological, which bears at least some of the hallmarks of our rationality or a conscious rejection of the rational. This tale can be completely fictional, pure invention, or it may be non-fictional, a biography of somebody's life perhaps, or perhaps, remarkably, a strange, new combination of the two; a tale both real and imaginary.

Perhaps all stories are a mixture, both of the real and of the imaginary. Perhaps all stories must be a mixture of the two for even in the driest of biography there must be speculation; motives are never clear-cut even when the subject can still be interrogated and in that most outlandish of fiction, fantasy, there is still enough grounding in the real world and real events to suggest even allegory, a charge to which even Tolkien himself was in a sense, though he denied it, guilty of.

Story has a two-fold purpose; it satisfies the need to tell ("The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at really long story that would hold the attention of readers.....") and it satiates the desire to hear ("none so relevant to the human situation and yet so free from allegory") . For, in each story, there is a tale, whatever its literary worth, which we, despite ourselves, wish to hear; for it, alone among so many, may offer the one true solution to our existence, some most profound insight into one's predicament as a sentient being.

Telling, and listening to, stories is the bedrock of our existence; how else to explain the ubiquity of God, or gods, or 'Creation myths' throughout human history if not to make sense of the world, and our place in it, through story. Telling stories is how we make sense of our lives, give it some kind of order, some sort of grounding in time and space. All of the things that we say or write or express as music, art, dance, all these things tell a story if we only have the ears to listen; only the monosyllabic reply seldom tells tales. And yet, even here: 

"Foamfollower's question caught him wandering. 'Are you a storyteller, Thomas Covenant?'  Absently, he (Covenant) replied, 'I was, once.'
'And you gave it up? Ah, that is as sad a tale in three words as any you might have told me. But a life without a tale is like a sea without salt. How do you live?'.................
'I live.'
'Another?' Foamfollow returned. 'In two words, a story sadder than the first. Say no more - with one word you will make me weep.' " 

 Just as we live our life in and surrounded by the story of our own existence, so other people's stories intrude on our lives and ours on theirs and make up new and yet more wondrous stories, ever branching, ever forking and yet one must try to disentangle these strands, this 'garden of forking paths', if we are not to become termininally confused; we must attempt to separate each story from its neighbours if we are to give each separate individual as well as ourselves their own space and time in our lives.

Although I did not originally intend it, the following tale is an example of what happens when you do not quite separate the stories, wholly different in space and time, events and emotions, and instead they merge, quantum superpositions of a state of grace. The events detailed below could have happened, although did not, in the imagined world of a recent allegory just as they happened in another allegory many years before. It is strange how history, or stories, have a habit of repeating themselves. Perhaps, although we may deny it, there is some vital essence, some 'I', which does not change with the passing years but remains constant; an anchor from, and into, the past, kept firm and fast by the taut chains of memory.

Since references abound to 'Another Fairy Story (Parts 1-10)' - 

 http://malcolmgoodson.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/another-fairy-story-fit-first.html  - 

you may want to read that if you haven't already done so. The events detailed in this tale occur in the time of  'Fit the last' as the three travellers make their way home from the castle and tells of their overnight stay at the inn.

It is strange to revisit that tale after so long, the synthesis of two lives, the Princess and Antigone; the allegory and the conjecture. Perhaps, I was never really content with the parts played by the two soldiers; perhaps I thought they deserved more then a mere comic interlude, although they had no real place in either the allegory or the conjecture and they were just there as a device to provide light relief.

And so, this is my guerdon for Toad and Bull, who deserved better; my counterpoint, just a little more of their theme interlacing with that of the Princess.

The encounter at the inn

It was beyond nightfall when the three riders came upon the sign of ‘The Raven’, the inn Bull had chosen for their overnight sojourn. As they rode through the gate in the wall before the inn, the courtyard within was faintly illuminated by the glow of the lamps hung inside each of the windows and by the faint moonlight which filtered through the thin clouds which hung, as though suspended from heaven on gossamer threads, far above their heads.

(to be continued)