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Once Upon a Version

A label used on this site

The One-Evening Text

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The one-evening text is this site's name for any single text it quotes. Each one is a witness that can be placed: a named edition, a manuscript or a written record. None of them is the story itself, however familiar its wording has become.

What “one evening” means

The phrase is a figure of speech. It does not claim that a text was taken down from a single telling on a single night. A tale passed through several tellers, a text that compilers assembled from more than one source, and a text revised from one edition to the next are all one-evening texts too; they simply passed through more hands. What makes a text a one-evening text is that it can be pinned to a particular edition, page or document, not that it records one performance.

How a one-evening text is recorded

Because a single text may have passed through several people, each article's Telling card keeps their roles apart:

  • Teller and Told record who told or wrote it, and when and where.
  • Recorded by names whoever took a telling down.
  • Edited by names whoever edited or rewrote it, and in which edition.
  • Published records where and when it was first printed.

Where the record is silent, the field says unrecorded instead of filling the gap with a guess. Where a step never took place, the field says n/a.

Why it matters

Calling every text a one-evening text keeps two different printings from being merged. The “Goose Girl” printed by the Brothers Grimm in 1815 and the one printed in 1857 are two texts, not two copies of one: in the 1815 print the stove she confides in is a Kachelofen, a tiled stove, and in the 1857 print it is an Eisenofen, an iron stove. A sentence about what “the Goose Girl” says has to name which one it means.

The same habit governs every comparison on this site. When versions are set side by side, each quotation keeps its own edition, year and page, and no paragraph blends two of them into a single “standard” story. The rules are set out in full on Tracing a version, and the Telling card for the 1815 “Goose Girl” appears in Brothers Grimm: Their ‘Peasant Woman’ Was a Tailor’s Wife.

Where this site uses the term