[f. TALE sb. + TELLER.]
1. A teller of tales or stories; a narrator.
1387. Trevisa, Higden (Rolls), I. 337. Beda knew neuere þat ilond wiþ his eyȝe; bot some tale tellere [L. relator] tolde hym suche tales.
1530. Palsgr., 279/1. Taletellar, emboucheur, discur de fables.
1623. Cockeram, III, Bebeus, a notable Tale-teller.
1728–30. Pope, in Spence, Anecd. Bks. & Men, I. (1820), 19. Chaucer … is the first Tale-teller in the true and enlivened natural way.
1841. D’Israeli, Amen. Lit. (ed. 2), I. 114. Even two learned Greeks acknowledged that the tale-teller of Certaldo [Baccaccio], in his variegated pages, had displayed such force and diversity in his genius, that no Greek writer could be compared with his ‘volgare eloquenza.’
1871. Morris, in Mackail, Life (1899), I. 263. Thou tale-teller of vanished men.
1912. G. B. Stallworthy, Legends of Samoa, 4.
| Loved was he [R. L. Stevenson] too in Britain far away: | |
| Tale-teller he when Vi-to-ri-a was Queen. |
2. A talebearer; a tell-tale. Also fig.
1377. Langl., P. Pl., B. XX. 297. Alle taletellers and tyterers in ydel.
1494. Fabyan, Chron., VII. ccxxvi. 254. By ill tale tellers … this brotherlye loue was after desolued.
1583. Babington, Commandm., ix. (1622), 87. To be a taleteller and false witnesse.
1619. in Ferguson & Nanson, Munic. Rec. Carlisle (1887), 277. Slandering Robert James to be comon tayle teller to Mr. Chancelor.
1896. Black, Briseis, xix. How quick a tale-teller is the expression of your face, to one who has the skill to remark.
3. One who tells a ‘tale’ or made-up story with the object of deceiving or misleading.
1894. Daily News, 28 March, 5/5. Persons who had not backed horses on the recommendation of a ‘tale-teller.’
So Tale-telling sb., the telling of tales, story-telling; a., that tells tales or stories.
1556. Olde, Antichrist, 116. Thus the harlot bewrayeth him self in his owne tale telling.
1743. Francis, trans. Hor., Odes, I. xviii. 16. The broad-glaring eye of the tale-telling day.
1833. Ht. Martineau, Charmed Sea, iv. 54. One is winked at for a tale-telling traveller, if one says what I am saying now.
1864. W. P. Dickson, trans. Mommsen’s Hist. Rome (ed. 2), I. I. xv. 228. His [the Italian’s] acuteness of perception and his charming versatility enabled him to excel in irony and in the vein of tale-telling such as we find in Horace and Boccaccio.
1897. G. B. Woodberry, S. T. Coleridge, ¶ 8. As a story of connected and consequential incidents with a plot, a change of fortune, a climax, and the other essentials of this species of tale-telling, it [Ancient Mariner] has unity.
1898. Saintsbury, Short Hist. Eng. Lit., x. i. The wild stories which float through mediæval tale-telling.
