Thank you, @snook, for reminding us of the Oral Tradition
Good advice to aspiring writers: Read your story out loud
There's a reason for that.
Before the written word, Native Americans handed down stories via oral tradition. Europeans and Greeks handed down The Odyssey and Illiad that way. Funny thing: minutes earlier, I was talking about Germany's own epic (their "Odyssey," it's been said), the Nibelungenlied, was told and retold, and many versions of it exist, because nobody agreed on just one version -
Who told the story first? We don't remember.
What is left of the story now?
Something so GREAT, it survives a thousand years later!
(Or 2,000 years, for the Greek Odyssey)