Popular fairy tales back to the Bronze Age
Academics have revealed that fairy tales including Beauty And The Beast and Rumpelstiltskin can be traced back thousands of years, with some even predating the English language.
In the 19th century Wilhelm Grimm, of the famous Brothers Grimm, believed that many of the stories they popularised were rooted in a shared cultural history dating back to the birth of the Indo-European language family.
But later thinkers challenged that view, saying that some stories were much younger, and passed into oral tradition having first been written down by writers from the 16th and 17th centuries.
Using techniques normally employed by biologists, researchers studied common links between stories from around the world and found some have roots that are far older than previously known.
Dr Jamie Tehrani, who worked with folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva, believed the research has answered a question about our cultural heritage. She said: ‘We can come firmly down on the side of Wilhelm Grimm.
‘Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record and indeed further back than Classical mythology – some versions of these stories appear in Latin and Greek texts – but our findings suggest they are much older than that
Rumpelstiltskin, the renowned German classic, is also believed to be from the same millennium.
Jack And The Beanstalk is said to have been rooted in a group of stories classified as The Boy Who Stole Ogre’s Treasure.
It can be traced back 5,000 years and a folk tale called The Smith And The Devil was estimated to go back 6,000 years to the Bronze Age.
The study employed phylogenetic analysis, which was developed to investigate evolutionary relationships between species, Dr Tehrani said: ‘We find it pretty remarkable these stories have survived without being written.
‘They have been told since before even English, French and Italian existed.
Fairy stories often have themes common to humans throughout the world and through all ages, such as family, betrayal, violence and survival, he said.
Source: Daily mail
N.H.khider