Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers (2016)

There are thematic similarities between the ancient Indo-European religions. In the Germanic branch, there are the Norns, three female beings responsible for the fates of humanity. There are the three Moirai, the Fates, in Greek mythology. There are the three mothers, also responsible for humanity's fate, in Celtic mythology. Fifteen hundred years later, there are three "weird sisters" in Macbeth.

These cultures shared substantial mythology. Greek mythology c 500 BC and Norse mythology c 800 AD have some two thousand years of separation between the branches, and yet substantial common elements - themes, story elements if you wish - remain. Of course, some degree of exchange was going on the whole time. It's not like these themes were preserved in isolation. The ancients themselves often noticed these connections - and sometimes made connections where there actually weren't any historically, e.g. between Egyptian and Greek gods.

I am reminded of two ancient novels. Apuleius's Metamorphoses, and Lucian's True Story. Both are, essentially, fantasy novels - satirical fantasy novels, highly aware of the existing mythological and fantastical traditions of their time, and they rip them apart.

In the Metamorphoses by Apuleius (a reference to Ovid's very serious treatment of Roman mythology in the also-titled Metamorphoses) the protagonist (spoilers!) very much wishes to become a wizard and gets himself accidentally turned into a sentient donkey - who is promptly sold to a disputable cult leader, and then the comical misfortunes really begin. To the modern eye it's almost impossible to not read it as placing a Roman noble in the body of a beast of burden, but with the soul of a man, and interpreting it as a critique of slavery, while telling funny stories, commenting on Roman beliefs, and indeed, making fun of many of the fantastical themes common at the time. Though if the slavery commentary is really what Apuleius intended is controversial; he may not have seen the irony we see and may have just been having fun.

Lucian's True Story is just completely over the top, it starts with being lost in the Atlantic ocean and washing up on a tropical magical island, and ends with a war with the inhabitants of the Moon.

I bring them up because, having come relatively later to the classics, reading them for the first time as an adult, I remember being constantly surprised with a sense of novelty yet familiarity. Surely these ideas are not so old?

PS: The Smith and the Devil (claimed to be 6K yo) is well knows in Basque culture, there's a pretty fun movie from 2017: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5592878/

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tales>

I had the good fortune to be gifted this as a child. The book itself is a treasure, both verbally and visually (the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich commissioned illustrations specifically for the collection). But the real staying power is returning again and again to the stories, and recognising that these are ... not archetypes, but ... I'm struggling to find the right word, perhaps examplars of a type or class.

This struck me a few years ago as I was re-familiarising myself with Greek and Roman mythology, and as I was reading of Pyramis and Thisbe realised "hey, this is Romeo and Juliet!" Sure enough, that seems to be a fairly well-established connection. And the idea that far older primordial tales have reached us, often through multiple paths and variations, seems highly probable.

There's also the notion of a period in such traditions made their way from oral to written traditions, often in the context of urbanisation and the establishment of empires. This has strong relations to what's called the Axial Age, roughly 800-200 BCE, in which the great cultures of Western (Greek), Indian (Hindu), and Chinese (Confucian), amongst others, theologies and philosophies emerged. Whilst oral traditions can transmit information over generations, it's often lossy and inexact. Writing has as both a strength and curse the property of fixing ideas in a specific representation (though subject to its own agents of change and decay), as famously feared by Socrates in Plato's "Phaedrus". The concerns seem quaint to us, largely because we're in the world those influences created. Socrates was speaking from the Before Times. A condition we might apply to ourselves on occasion as well.

And what they track is not full stories but “tropes” like woman marries magic animal who is really a man under a spell. It it really impossible that this trope could have appeared indepently in mutiple places?

So headlines like this always make me smile a bit.

But still, new evidence is always super interesting.

Quote:

The method could be compared to a cake recipe as follows:

1. Take 275 tales. These can be found in any specialist ‘Tales of Magic’ delicatessen or curiosity shop.

2. Separate the yolks from the whites. In other words the presence or absence of these tales in 50 Indo-European speaking populations.

3. Mix with a smattering of jargon and statistics. I found the paper to be written in a statistical analysis style, therefore not very accessible.

4. While the cake is in the oven draw some language trees. These indicate how populations have historically come into contact over time (population dispersal and the diversification of linguistic lineages).

5. Remove from the oven and cool. Ice the cake by skimming over debates of written versus oral narrative, and the distinctions or overlaps between them.

The written-oral debate acknowledges that there is a difficulty in tracing oral stories because tales are so easily transportable by travellers. There has been interaction of oral and written texts overtime, with one informing the other (Bottingheimer 2009, 2014). This basically means that what is an oral folktale, and each tales origins is unclear.

For example, different renditions of Arabian Nights indicated that translators created new stories inspired from oral and literary traditions (Warner 2012: 18). While this demonstrates some of the issues with the paper’s source materials it also illustrates how fearless Graça da Silva and Tehrani (2016) were trying to tackle the complex subject of oral folklore utilising new methodologies.

6. To finish the cake, sprinkle the results with statistics to see whether the 275 tales were more likely to spread generation to generation or across geographical areas due to migration, trade, and encounters between groups of people.

7. Eat the cake.

It is impossible to trace back the origin of stories in our past without either written documents or oral traditions. Everything else is made up correlations and patterns.

A sentence like "The results of the analyses suggested that a substantial number of tales exhibit significant correlations with linguistic relationships that are consistent with vertical processes of cultural inheritance." is just empty words. It is baseless speculation covered in a scientific jargon, and what Harry Frankfurt would call Bullshit.

You could as well write "The results of the bullshit suggested that a bullshit number of tales exhibit bullshit correlations with bullshit relationships that are bullshit with bullshit processes of cultural bullshit".

There is a large part of the academic community where everything that matters is producing academic-sounding material to stay relevant, get more money and continue doing bullshit.

Now, the interesting thing is that the actual conclusion of the paper is actually true - fairytales share a common root, we see the same stories worldwide, and this has been known in mythology and psychology for a long time. But this research does not add anything new, and forgets to mention the interesting aspects well-known in comparative mythology.

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” - Harry G. Frankfurt