Today is national Tell A Story Day and the start of this year’s 10-day Scottish International Storytelling Festival, with events across Scotland.

The theme is folklore, myth and legend and the guest storytellers include Icelander Sigurborg Hannesdottir and Nina Naesheim of Norway. “People associate the Scandinavian countries with the great sagas,” says Donald Smith, director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh, “but they have a rich tradition of folktales.

“Elves are very big. They’re the equivalent of our fairy people. They live underground. They can be benevolent but get a bit nasty if you get on their wrong side.”

Mr Smith recalls visiting Ms Hannesdottir last year. She took him to a tiny island in the Western Fjords, where only two families live, and said: “Over there are about 1.5 million puffins and down there two million eider ducks.”

“That’s how it is,” Mr Smith says, “frail, fragile and utterly beautiful.”

As in Scotland, ghost stories are very popular in Scandinavia and the countries share a love of the landscape that translates into tales about how place names came about: “memorialising the landscape”, as Mr Smith puts it.

Festival director Joanna Bremner says that memorialising the natural environment features strongly in this year’s programme. “Often a storyteller will build a story based around the traditional role of a particular plant or tree they come upon. They might also tell a funny story about how it got its distinctive looks.”

Arranged story-walks for those aged seven and older include “Wild and Wonderful Story Trail” at Almondell Country Park near Broxburn in West Lothian with Grace Banks and Angela Knowles on Sunday, October 27, and “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” at Wooplaw Woods near Galashiels with John Hamilton on November 3.

For Mr Hamilton, environmental education is about conveying information but he says: “You can create a sense of wonder about a bird or something people are likely to see, if they are looking.”

Orkney-based storyteller Marita Luck and American storyteller Wendy Welch will be at one of two new venues for the festival. They will be spinning folkore from around the globe, including Egypt and the Orient, for four-year-olds upwards on a “Magic Carpet Ride” at Dundee Contemporary Arts on November 2.

“There will be chanting and action stories and we will probably do one internationally recognised tale, such as Little Red Riding Hood, where the children can join in,” says Ms Welch.

Stirling’s redeveloped Tolbooth, unveiled as a cultural centre, is the other new venue and another destination for John Hamilton. He and Heather Yule will share international tales, including Celtic romances, with six-year-olds upwards, to the accompaniment of the boran and clarsach.

Mr Hamilton is fascinated by the way storytelling has related wisdom down through history, for hundreds of thousands of years.

“I recently discovered that a tale I thought for years was Irish - because it has a lot of the motifs of a European wonder tale - is actually a Japanese Zen tale,” he says. “It just underlines the commonness in the international sphere.”

Scottish International Storytelling Festival, contact Joanna Bremner or Jill Bush, tel 0131 557 5724 or 556 9579

www.storytellingcentre.org.ukev.html for festival events and

www.storytellingcentre.org.ukssc for Tell A Story Day events

TIPS FOR TELL A STORY DAY

To capture the spirit of the best storytellers, Ewan McVicar has a few tips

* Choose a story you enjoy and want or need to share. Avoid dry myths; go for surprise or excitement.

* Identify and learn the bones of the story, not the exact written text.

* Remember, a spoken story works differently from a story on the page. Simplify language and description and keep mainly to the action.

* Tell the story to yourself a few times. Check the text again, then put the book away. Make the tale your version of the story, not the voice of the author of the book where you found it.

* Do not start telling the tale until all the children are settled and ready.

* Start off with something they can join in with, such as a song or a rhyme. It will gather them in and focus them.

* Decide in advance how and where you will begin. Use a formula - “Once upon a time” or “Did you hear about the I?” - if you want.

* Remember to recap a couple of times, especially after interruptions.

* Do not use puppets, illustrations or other physical aids the first time you tell a story, just get through it - bare bones if need be - and never apologise for the quality of what you did or identify omissions.

* Have fun! If you do not enjoy it, how can the audience?