Storytelling Starters ~ Dear as Salt
Saturday, November 19th, 2016
Thursday night, we went to see King Lear in the Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Barbican. It was hard and long and brilliant and Anthony Sher was a completely believable and utterly moving Lear. As his three daughters responded to his request to tell him how much they loved him, it was immediately clear what devastating effects would follow from what the youngest of them said.
Given the harsh immediacy of those early scenes, I suppose it was odd but also inevitable given the way the human brain works (or perhaps it’s just storytellers or maybe just me!) that, during them and later, a story I used to tell was hovering somewhere in my brain. The following morning, I looked it up.
Dear as Salt is a story from Bologna. It appears in Italian Folktales, the wonderful collection made by Italo Calvino. As exhilaratingly daft as Lear is tragic, it’s a story I used sometimes to tell during the years when I was storytelling at Somerset House in London. In times long past, Somerset House was where the Salt Office was housed. So in my programmes of stories of the place itself, I usually included one or other story of salt. Hence Dear as Salt which, like King Lear, also begins with a king asking his three daughters to tell him how much they love him. In the Shakespeare play, the results are devastating. And in Dear as Salt? Well let me briefly tell you the story.
Dear as Salt: an Italian folktale
A king challenged his daughters: ‘ You don’t love me!’ The eldest said, ‘I do. You’re as dear to me as bread.’ The middle one replied, ‘You’re as dear as wine.’ The youngest said, ‘As dear as salt.’ (more…)