Who This Site Is For

Once Upon a Version looks into where stories came from. Folktales, myths and detective stories are traced back to the people who told them, wrote them down, edited them and printed them, and each page tries to leave you knowing three things about one version: who told it, in what year, and to whom.

The site is written for adult readers who search for a tale, a book or a teller by name, and for writers who want to see how a public-domain story is built. It is also written for readers of detective fiction and for anyone who likes to compare myths across cultures. It is not a children's site, and it does not retell stories for young readers.

Four ways in

The site has four sections, and every article belongs to one of them.

• The Teller's Craft reads public-domain stories passage by passage: who narrates, who is listening, what the narrator knows and when the reader is told. Examples include the unnamed narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and the stove the Goose Girl confides in, which is not the same stove in the Grimms' 1815 and 1857 printings.
• Mystery Tellers follows detective stories in English and French back to their first printings and asks who, inside the story, tells the case. Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories, the narrator of Arsène Lupin's first adventure and the memoirs published under the name of Vidocq all belong here.
• Motifs Across Cultures sets myths and legends side by side in named editions and translations, counts what they share and lists where they differ. Orpheus and Eurydice, Cupid and Psyche, and Pandora with her jar are among its subjects.
• One Tale, Many Tellers follows one tale through the people who told it and the editions that printed it. It starts with the women and men the Brothers Grimm named as their sources and includes Sleeping Beauty in Basile, Perrault and the Grimms, and Beauty and the Beast in its French texts of 1740 and 1756.

Each article is a small investigation into one story's background. Tellers are named where the record names them. Telling, recording, editing and publishing are kept in separate columns, because they were often done by different people. Public-domain editions are quoted closely enough to be compared sentence by sentence, and where a motif is compared across texts, the comparison comes as a grid with a table you can download.

Some things are left out on purpose. There are no picture-book buying guides or reading lists for children. Film and television adaptations are left alone, and new releases are not followed. Gods and heroes appear only as subjects of comparison, never in one-line “who is this god” entries. The site sells no writing course and offers no ghostwriting, and it gives no tarot, spiritual or ritual guidance; where a tale mentions a herb, a cure or a rite, it is read as a plot point, not as a method anyone should try.

Where this site stands

The tagline says it plainly: Every tale was told by someone. No single text is treated here as the story itself. Every text quoted on this site is one witness that can be placed: somebody told it or wrote it, somebody may have taken it down, somebody edited it and somebody printed it. Reading a story closely means finding those people and those editions again, and where a name or a date cannot be found, the page says unrecorded rather than guessing.

That view leads to a few positions, held openly and open to argument.

The word “original” should be retired. A folktale has an earliest surviving telling, not an original, and a claim about “the original Sleeping Beauty” sells something that does not exist unless it names the teller or the edition and the year. On this site, every “original” and every “earliest” is followed in the same sentence by a name and a date. In this site's studio terms, Basile's, Perrault's and the Grimms' Sleeping Beauty are three different pressings, and none of them is the story itself.

Detective stories are worth reading for who is telling them and when the reader is told, not only for the brilliance of the detective. Poe's narrator in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” tells the story after the case is closed, so he already knows the answer while he lets the evidence arrive in the order he met it. Which Holmes stories Watson tells, and which he does not, is a question this site counts rather than assumes. Each work's way of narrating is taken on its own terms, not forced into a single pattern of detective and assistant.

There are also lines this site does not cross. It does not judge whether any religion is true, and it does not comment on present-day religious groups. It does not take sides in arguments over which country a tale belongs to; it reports what the documents say. Likeness between two myths is counted and described, never declared a common origin.

Three labels recur across the site, each with its own page:

• The Borrowed Hearth names the way a preface or title page can present specific, named tellers as the voice of a nameless folk tradition.
• The One-Evening Text is this site's name for any single text it quotes: one edition, manuscript or record, not the story as a whole.
• The Narrator's Pocket is whatever a narrative has not yet handed to the reader at a given point, sorted by why it is still held back.

The colors of the site come from the plant-dyed yarns of a German spinning room, a room often pictured as the home of the fairy tale: unbleached linen for the background, weld yellow saddened with iron into an olive for the brand color, woad blue for links, and madder red for notes.

How a version is checked

Every article opens with In short, three lines that answer the main question before anything else. Next comes a Telling card, which records in nine fixed fields who told, recorded, edited and published the text under discussion, and which edition is quoted. Every quotation is tied to a named edition and page and carries a Voice tag saying who told or wrote it and where it was printed. When two versions are compared, they are set side by side in their own words and never merged into one “standard” version.

Dates, editions and attributions each come with a source. Texts are quoted at length only when the original, the translation, the illustration and the scan are all in the public domain in the United States, Germany and France. The data behind each motif grid can be downloaded as a CSV file and recounted. The full set of rules, from the nine fields to the four states of a motif grid, is on Tracing a version.

If something is wrong

Errors are welcome. Write to contact@onceuponaversion.com with the address of the page, the sentence in question and the source that shows the problem. There is no reporting form; email is the only channel.

A correction is dated at the foot of the page it changes and listed on the version history page. Text is not changed silently, and an earlier wording that was wrong is recorded rather than erased. What else that address is for is set out on the contact page.