(Phys.org)—Common fairy tales were subjected to a phylogenetic study by two
academics, who discovered that many of them appear to be far older than
previously believed. Sara Graça da Silva, a social scientist and folklorist
at the New University of Lisbon, and Jamshid Tehrani, an anthropologist at
Durham University, describe their linguistic research and the reasons they
think at least one fairy tale has roots in the Bronze Age in a paper that
was recently published in Royal Society Open Science.
The popularity of fairy tales has spread to various communities across the
world; for instance, Beauty and the Beast has been recounted in various
forms all over the world. Most of these fairy tales are thought to have been
around for many hundred years before they were written down, according to
modern linguists and anthropologists. However, according to this latest
study, they are actually considerably older than that, with some dating back
thousands of years.
The researchers utilized a method often used in biology to reach these
conclusions: they constructed phylogenetic trees to track the evolution of
language characteristics. They began with 275 magically based fairy tales
and reduced them to 76 fundamental tales. Then, trees based on some of the
extinct Indo-European languages were created. In doing so, the researchers
discovered evidence that some fairy tales, including Jack and the Beanstalk,
had their origins in other myths and could be traced back to the separation
of the Western and Eastern Indo-European languages, which occurred around
5,000 years ago. As a result, it is obvious that these tales predate the
Bible and even Greek myths.
One fairy tale in particular, they note, was very clear. Called The Smith
and The Devil, they traced it back approximately 6,000 years, to the Bronze
Age. The researchers placed confidence factors on different results,
depending on how strong the trees that could be built were. Some were
obviously less clear than others, but one fairy tale in particular, they
note, was very clear.
The legendary Grimm brothers published several fairy tales in 1812, and
Wilhelm Grimm stated that he thought the stories were thousands of years
old. That claim was quickly refuted, but the scholars now contend that he
was correct the entire time.
