They’ve been handed down from generation
to generation in the form of bedtime stories,
books, and movies, so we all have a passing
experience with them.
Because of this, fairy tales also reflect
our cultural history.
They showcase what we think about good and
evil, morality and punishment.
But how old are they?
Turns out, a lot older than we thought.
By thousands of years!
One of the most famous people to speculate
on the origin of fairy tales was Wilhelm Grimm
of the Brothers Grimm.
You know, the one that looks like Matt Damon?
He argued that the folk tales he and his brother
compiled were actually part of ancient oral
traditions that stretched from Scandinavia
to South Asia!
Grimm thought these stories were thousands
of years old, and marked the beginning of
Indo-European language.
Since then, studying folklore has become a
full-time job in academia.
Some folklorists disagreed with Grimm.
They said that since there was little evidence
to prove fairy tales’ existence as oral
tradition, they probably were only recently
invented along with other printed literature.
That was… until anthropologist Jamie Tehrani
and folklorist Sara Graça da Silva dropped
some science on them in a breakthrough article
in the journal “Royal Society Open Science”.
They used tools usually reserved for evolutionary
biologists, such as phylogenetic methods that
examine the fairy tales’ relationships with
population histories, geographical distances
and linguistic patterns.
The researchers also traced the tales along
a “tree” of Indo-European languages to
see how far back they went.
Using a massive classification of folk tales
called the “Aarne Thompson Uther Index,”
they studied common links between 275 stories
in the group known as “Tales of Magic.”
They focused on these stories featuring the
supernatural, because they represented the
largest group and included the tales with
the most commonly debated origins.
And it worked!
They discovered that at least 76 of these
fairy tales were being told before English,
French or Italian even existed as languages.
“Little Red Riding Hood” originated around
2,000 years ago between Europe and the Middle
East.
“Jack and the Beanstalk” (grouped in with
a series of tales known as “The Boy Who
Stole Ogre’s Treasure”) is 5,000 years
old.
“Beauty and the Beast” and “The Name
of the Supernatural Helper” (aka “Rumplestiltskin”)
may have first been written down in the 17th
and 18th centuries, but they’re between
2,500 and 6,000 years old!
But what was the oldest fairy tale they found?
A story called “The Smith and the Devil,”
dating back at least 6,000 years to the Bronze
Age, predating the oldest known ancestor of
Indo-European languages.
It goes something like this: Once upon a time,
a blacksmith sells his soul to an evil supernatural
being in exchange for the ability to weld
any materials together.
Then he uses this skill to leash that darn
Devil to an immovable object and get outta
the deal!
And all this time you thought that was the
plot of Tenacious D’s “The Pick of Destiny.”
What’s even more important is that this
discovery could settle a debate about the
origin of Indo-European languages.
One hypothesis had these languages dating
back 9,000 years to the region that’s now
Turkey, but that population was neolithic
farmers who hadn’t even invented metallurgy
yet.
Tehrani and da Silva speculate that, more
likely, another idea is correct: Those languages
originated 5 to 6,000 years ago in the steppes
of Russia.
For more about folklore, ethical quandaries
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