The Story

It's Origin

Analysis

Links

The story of the StarFish Flinger(tm) would seem to be, from the sheer number of incarnations of it on the Internet, one of those universally understood tales, one of those that somewhow crosses all commonly understood divisors of humanity and which reaches deep within the reader to touch some common chord of emotion,  to pluck some heartstring of our shared humanity, to strum some chord of universal essence regardless of our gender, political affiliation, or our choice of morning beverage.

Like all classic apocryphal stories throughout antiquity, the origin of this modern classic is shrouded in mystery as well. Out of the hundreds of versions uncovered during the internet excavation phase of the research for this site, most had either no attribution at all or were attributed to "anonymous" or "unknown". There were, in the midst of this wasteland, a few accounts which provided some intriguing clues to it's origin; one attributed the story to "The Nieman Pick Newsletter (Jan,1996 issue)", which if it ever existed seems to either have vanished completely or exists without any internet trace. A second story enigmatically noted only that the story was found at St.Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. 

Further research did however uncover a few accounts which provided potentially more meaningful information. Two accounts stated that the story of the Star Fish Flinger is the work of one "Loren Eisley", with the piece identified as being part of some larger work entitled " The Star Thrower", and a third one said the story in question was "inspired by the writings of the anthropologist Loren Eiseley in his book, "The Unexpected Universe".

While any of these accounts taken alone do not provide any proof of the claims of authorship, when one considers that the elements of these attributed stories more closely match each other than many of the other version, and these stories were found in unrelated sections of the Web, one is led to the conclusion that there is at least some shared perception of the story's origination. Of course whether this "Loren" figure is an actual person who wrote the story, or who merely transcribed the story from some other source (a descendant of the infamous "Q"?) or whether the person's name itself merely exists to provide a human face to some divine wisdom passed from the divine to this earthly life is a topic for another discussion. 

Update: After extensive fieldwork I was able to locate and peruse a copy of Loren Eisley's "The Unexpected Universe" which while superficially laying to rest the question of authorship - there is a story of a writer (ed. presumably L.Eiseley) walking on a beach in Spain who encounters a young man who is engaged in throwing starfish from the shore back into the water) IN FACT raises some even larger questions about the actual origins of this story. What is interesting for the scholar and casual reader alike to note about Eiseley's tale is that the content of the conversation between the flinger and the walker is quite radically different from ALL of the versions found on the net, in fact the entire point of the person's activity and it's significance is given an extremely  different meaning. Eiseley's experience and conversation are most definately NOT the same as that of the writer in the folklore tale known as t"The Legend of the Starfish Flinger". One is left after reading Eisely's work to wonder whether these two stories are one and the same, only told and mistold so many times over the years (perhaps in an effort to simplify and provide a "moral" to the story, perhaps the alteration was a subtle one which developed unintentionally over the intervening 30 years since Eisley's original story was published) that the nature and point of the tale have been altered almost beyond recognition, or if some other writer vacationing in the South of Spain had an encounter and conversation with the same(or some other) young StarFish Flinger.  While the latter possibility is unlikely it can not yet be ruled out entirely since no evidence exists to disprove it.

If you would like to read more about the Legend of the Starfish Flinger I would suggest you either read some comparative analysis or read and compare some of the different versions yourself.

If you have comments or suggestions, email me at starfishman@oocities.com
 
 This page last modified on February 1, 1999.