Complex Numbers

Wagging Tales

Just an interesting tale of tales today.

Fairy Tales Could Be Older Than You Ever Imagined  
Jack may have been climbing that beanstalk for more than 5,000 years

Though I'm not sure how solid the foundation for this finding is, it's about storytelling, so it's actually relevant for once.

In a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, a folklorist and anthropologist say that stories like Rumpelstiltskin and Jack and the Beanstalk are much older than originally thought. Instead of dating from the 1500s, the researchers say that some of these classic stories are 4,000 and 5,000 years old, respectively. This contradicts previous speculation that story collectors like the Brothers Grimm were relaying tales that were only a few hundred years old.

Before writing, we're pretty sure people passed down their stories mouth to ear. There's no reason to believe that wouldn't have continued; not everyone in every society was - or is - literate.

It turns out that it’s pretty hard to figure out how old fairy tales are using simple historical data. Since the tales were passed down orally, they can be almost impossible to unwind using a historian or anthropologist’s traditional toolbox. So the team borrowed from biology, instead, using a technique called phylogenetic analysis. Usually, phylogenetic analysis is used to show how organisms evolved. In this case, researchers used strategies created by evolutionary biologists to trace the roots of 275 fairy tales through complex trees of language, population and culture.

While that's interesting and all that, I'd be inclined to want to hear how they justify using phylogenetic analysis for something for which it wasn't intended.

Using the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folk Tales, a kind of über index...

More like Uther index, amirite?

...that breaks fairy tales down into groups like “the obstinate wife learns to obey” and “partnership between man and ogre,”...

Both groups being what today we'd call "fantasy."

...the team tracked the presence of the tales in 50 Indo-European language-speaking populations.

It might also be illuminating to use this technique (if it's not found to be fatally flawed) on non-PIE-derived languages. There's a rich culture of fairy tales, or their equivalent, in the East.

But not everyone is certain that the study proves fairy tales are that old. As Chris Samoray writes for Science News, other folklorists are finding fault with the study’s insistence that The Smith and the Devil dates back to the Bronze Age—a time before a word for “metalsmith” is thought to have existed.

Clearly, skepticism is warranted (and encouraged), but in that particular example, so what? The thing about oral traditions is that each generation adds its own spin on the tradition. If environmental, cultural, or (in this case) technological changes occur, they'd probably morph the story to make it more accessible to a younger generation, one that lacks historical context. If you don't believe me, go watch one of the approximately two thousand remakes Hollywood puts out in a year.

Point being, maybe that particular story started out as "The Flint-Knapper and the Evil Spirit." No need for "metalsmith" to have been invented; that would come in after metalworking got going.

So, yeah, I wouldn't take anything here as hard evidence of the age of stories... but we're pretty sure storytelling itself is as old as humanity. Maybe it's when our ancestors started telling stories that we could finally call them "human."

But of course a writer would think that.