A Rowan Williams Interview with the GMTV Sunday Progamme

Lord Chris Smith:

Some people would probably say ‘Ah, but modern stories have come along and have taken the place of the old.’ That Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings, and suchlike ”“ these are the stories that we now live by and does it matter that we’ve lost some of the old stories that used to inform our grandparents and our great-grandparents?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think there are two things about that. One is of course that Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and so forth actually build on much older stories and bigger stories in some ways, and you get the most out of them when you know a bit about the world they come from, and the second is really to do with that world that they come from. The stories of Classical mythology, the stories of the Bible, are the stories that have shaped lots of people’s lives across history and lots of the art around us and the cultural world, the literary references, and so again if we want to experience the most when we’re encountering that heritage we need to know something about that.

Lord Chris Smith:

And just thinking about how we’ve lost some of that automatic knowledge, how do… if we want to put it back, how would we set about doing it? Is it the education system? Is it the media? Is it parents? Is it in the stuff of society? Where can we do things to intervene here?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think some of it is education and some of it is parenting. I think that for all sorts of reasons parents telling their children stories is a vastly important human activity. It’s no accident that that’s what we often associate with parenting. It’s stories being told. Rhymes and songs being communicated. It’s telling the generation coming along that their human experience is actually part of something bigger. Now, how you encourage that among parents is difficult, but I sometimes toy with the idea of people appointing community storytellers, but already you see sometimes at festivals and community events, you have storytellers in a way that actually you didn’t in decades past, because you take it more for granted. Now people are bringing that in a bit, bringing it back, that’s a good thing.

Lord Chris Smith:

Is it perhaps rediscovering a bit of the Medieval troubadour, who’d come and would gather a group of people around them and sing a song or tell a saga or whatever? Perhaps we’re rediscovering some of this?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think we probably are, yes, and I think at schools too people need to be perhaps quite unapologetic about communicating stories.

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