Fairy Tales Are Far Older Than Scholars Once Thought
January 21, 2016
Folklore scholars analyzing the language of popular fairy tales found that some of the stories originated more than 6,000 years ago. Sara Graca da Silva from the New University of Lisbon, Portugal, and anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani of Durham University in the United Kingdom published the remarkable findings this week in the journal Royal Society Open Science. The findings indicate that some fairy tales, such as “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Jack and the Beanstalk” are older than the myths of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and predate most of the religions of the world today.
Between 1807 and 1814, German brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm compiled a collection of fairy tales from Europe. The most popular tales include “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Rapunzel.” By 1857, Grimm’s Fairy Tales included a total of 210 stories. The Grimms collected many of the stories from printed sources, but also from the tales passed down by families over generations. Most scholars believe that such tales likely originated not long before they were first written down. This would make the oldest fairy tales a few centuries old at best. However, the Grimms believed many of the stories were much more ancient. They thought the basic themes of the tales were rooted in a common European culture that existed thousands of years ago.
Graca da Silva and Tehrani conducted a linguistic analysis of 275 different fairy tales. They found that some stories originated in earlier tales. From this group, they identified 75 basic stories. They then analyzed the linguistic elements of the these tales, creating a phylogenetic tree—a kind of “family tree” indicating the age and relationship of each story—back to their very earliest origins.
Many of the tales proved to be more than 1,000 years old. “Jack and the Beanstalk” was found to be particularly old. It may first have been told 5,000 years ago in a language that is no longer spoken. Another tale called “The Smith and the Devil” appears to be the most ancient. This story can be traced back to about 6,000 years ago during the Bronze Age. The scholars found that these fairy tales date back to the birth of the Indo-European language family. Many languages spoken in India, western Asia, and Europe originated from Indo-European, including English, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, Farsi, Hindi, and Urdu.
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