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.