About

Twice Told tells old legends and unsolved stories twice. First the way people told them, then the way the papers of the time record them. The two rarely match, and the gap between them is usually the most interesting part.

Starting from the archives

Every article goes back to the oldest papers we can find: parish registers, court files, letters, the newspapers of the day, and for a folk tale, the first time someone wrote it down. Many of these have been scanned by libraries and archives, from the Bibliothèque nationale de France to Japan’s National Diet Library, and we read them there, page by page.

Historians and folklorists who spent years with the same documents are the other half of the work. Where they have already counted the dead or traced a tale through its versions, we say so and follow their reasoning.

Reading the notes

The small numbers in the text lead to the sources at the end of each article. A fact gets at least two sources that don’t simply repeat each other, and at least one of them is a document from the time or the work of a scholar who studied those documents. Where the library allows it, the link opens the exact page of the scan, so you can read it for yourself.

Some sentences only report what one source says, such as a library describing how it acquired a print, or a magazine giving a date. Those sentences name the source, and the note cites it alone.

A signed encyclopedia entry by a named specialist counts like a short article. An unsigned dictionary or encyclopedia entry never stands alone behind a fact: it backs up another source, or shows how a word or a story is defined today. Blogs, Wikipedia and videos can point us toward a source, but they are never cited as one.

When the accounts disagree

They often do. Two chroniclers give different dates, a pamphlet triples the death toll, a later retelling adds a detail nobody wrote down at the time. When that happens, the article gives the range and says who says what. It doesn’t pick the most dramatic number.

Some things are simply unknown, and the article says so. What we couldn’t check is listed at the end, under “What we could not verify”, and sorted by kind: sources we haven’t seen, sources we know only because another writer quotes them, claims that rest on a single source, and questions the sources leave open.

Documents in their own language

Much of the material is in French, German, Japanese or Latin. We quote it in the original, with an English translation beside it, so you can compare the two. The translations are ours unless a note credits a published one. When an article leans heavily on a document, the whole text is transcribed and translated on a page of its own.

Pictures

Images are prints, engravings, paintings and maps from museum and library collections, credited under each one. None of them are generated or restored.

Corrections

If we get something wrong, we fix it in the article and add a dated note at the end saying what changed.