A new study released Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science reveals that classic fairy tales may date back thousands of years, and actually give clues as to where we come from.
Philogeny, the biological evolutionary history of a type of organism, was combined with philology, the study of the structure and development of language(s)by Durham University anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani and New University of Lisbon folklorist and social scientist Sara Graca da Silva. Their study presents an in-depth analysis of story themes from the ATU (Aarne-Thompson-Uther) classification.
Tehrani writes that, since folktales embody our shared fantasies, experiences and fears more than any other type of story, understanding the parts of them that remain stable throughout the years can “provide a unique window into universal and variable aspects of the human condition.”
Tales of Magic represents the largest category of fairy tales in the group. Tehrani and da Silva developed phylogenetic trees of the type usually used by biologists to illustrate the way various species have emerged from a common ancestor to show how the stories evolved.
Phylogeny’s application to fairy tales led them to the discovery that 76 of the story plots emerged hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago. They were transmitted from generation to generation orally until eventually being collected by philologists like the Grimm Brothers.
One of the most ancient tales, The Smith and the Devil, may date back 6,000 years. It is now told in many Indo-European languages, thought to possibly come from early metal workers from the Russian steppes. The fact that they lived in the beginning of the Bronze Age suggests a plausible context for a tale about a cunning smith who achieves superhuman mastery of his craft by making a deal with the Devil.
The researchers explain that the story’s narrative is associated with a Proto-Indo-European language that was actually the predecessor for many modern language families. The two most common theories as to who spoke those ancient dialects are farmers from Turkey about 9,000 years ago, or Russian steppe inhabitants, who mastered metalworking around 6,000 years ago.
Since the Turks 9,000 years ago lived before metallurgy was invented, it is unlikely that they would have had a tale whose hero was a blacksmith, thus leading to the conclusion that the Russian pastoralists came up with the tale.
The Grimms actually suggested in the 1800s that fairy tales were older than thought at the time. Wilhelm Grimm claimed that some of their stories from 1812 might date from ancient times. The theory was rejected by the brothers’ contemporaries, although now is proven correct by the new research.
Some of the ancient tales are examples of the world’s best-known fairy tales. Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstilskin are 3,000 to 4,000 years old.They first appeared just when Indo-European languages were beginning to form. Little Red Riding Hood originated about 2,000 years ago, first recounted in a region that lies somewhere between Europe and the Middle East.
Most of the ancient tales have many versions and can be found with similar iterations from various parts of the world. Little Red Riding Hood was Tehrani’s first phylogenetic analysis, which showed that the tale exists in countless forms across Asia, Europe and Africa.
In addition to the familiar American story about a little girl who gets eaten by a wolf pretending to be her grandmother, East Asia has a version in which the grandmother is actually a leopard in disguise, who persuades a group of sisters to let him into their house and then eats one of them.
Central Africa has a story of a girl tricked by an ogre who pretends to be her brother, who eats her. She is released when her brother tracks down and kills the ogre. Another story called The Wolf and the Kids tells the tale of a group of goat kids who are devoured by a wolf who tricks them by pretending to be their mother.
By using philology to analyze the language, characters and plots from fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, Tehrani built a family tree, starting with a single ancient ancestor and branching off into groups, one of which eventually gives rise to the familiar Grimm version of the story.
Tehrani says they “think this is the start of a much bigger project using oral traditions and storytelling as windows into the lives of our ancestors.”