"it might have been clearer to us plebs had you used nice simple synonyms like "story" and "narrative".

It might have been, but I'm buggered if I'm going to pander to the neurotic 'worthy illiterate' one moment 'scathing historian' the next bi-polarity definitionists cover their track with.

So far as I can tell the collector's position is 'you can't find one author so everyone/ the people wrote it and I'm their emissary on earth' jibberish. I've seen nothing but time-served self-promotion or bald opinion to underpin this tulipomania and as such my opinion is as good as anyone's. If the tradition is indeed some kind of cumulative manifestation of unworded society, its story machinations go beyond any compound narrative form I'm familiar with anywhere in the world so on balance, I'm sticking with the idea unknown clever folk wrote the originals.