Before we took ‘story’ from French, the Old English word was ‘spell’ – the very same word that now means a magic incantation. A parable was a byspell (bīspell), an old wives’ tale was an old queens’ spell (aldra cwēna spell), a tale of woe was a woe spell (wēaspell), and the gospel was the good spell (gōdspell, ‘good news’). If we stuck to Anglo-Saxon roots, we’d call the art of storytelling ‘spellcraft’, a fairy tale an ‘elf spell’, a sob story a ‘woop spell’, and a children’s story a ‘childerspell’.