Fairy tale origins thousands of years old, researchers say
Fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast can be traced back thousands of years, according to researchers at universities in Durham and Lisbon.
Using techniques normally employed by biologists, academics studied links between stories from around the world and found some had prehistoric roots.
They found some tales were older than the earliest literary records, with one dating back to the Bronze Age.
The stories had been thought to date back to the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Durham University anthropologist Dr Jamie Tehrani, said Jack and the Beanstalk was rooted in a group of stories classified as The Boy Who Stole Ogre's Treasure, and could be traced back to when Eastern and Western Indo-European languages split more than 5,000 years ago. Analysis showed Beauty And The Beast and Rumpelstiltskin to be about 4,000 years old.
And a folk tale called The Smith And The Devil, about a blacksmith selling his soul in a pact with the Devil in order to gain supernatural abilities, was estimated to go back 6,000 years to the Bronze Age.
Once upon a time...
A blacksmith strikes a deal with a malevolent supernatural being, such as the Devil, Death or a genie.
The blacksmith exchanges his soul for the power to weld any materials together.
He then uses this power to stick the villain to an immovable object, such as a tree, to renege on his side of the bargain.
This basic plot is stable throughout the Indo-European speaking world, from India to Scandinavia, according to the research.
The study said this tale could be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European society when metallurgy likely existed and there was archaeological and genetic evidence of massive territorial expansions by nomadic tribes from the Pontic steppe (the northern shores of the Black Sea) between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago.
However, John Lindow, a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley, casts doubt on the theory in Science News, saying the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary for working with metal was limited and the word "smith" might not have existed.
If true, that would mean the version of "The Smith and the Devil" used in the study may not be that old, he said. 'Pretty remarkable'
Dr Tehrani, who worked with folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva, from the New University of Lisbon, said: "We find it pretty remarkable these stories have survived without being written.
"They have been told since before even English, French and Italian existed. They were probably told in an extinct Indo-European language."
In the 19th Century, authors the Brothers Grimm believed many of the fairy tales they popularised, including Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel and Snow White, were rooted in a shared cultural history dating back to the birth of the Indo-European language family.
Later thinkers challenged that view, saying some stories were much younger and had been passed into oral tradition, having first been written down by writers from the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Dr Jamie Tehrani said: "We can come firmly down on the side of Wilhelm Grimm.
"Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record and indeed further back than Classical mythology - some versions of these stories appear in Latin and Greek texts - but our findings suggest they are much older than that."
'Biology toolkit'
The study, which was published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, employed phylogenetic methods to investigate the relationships between population histories and cultural phenomena, such as languages, marriage practices, political institutions, material culture and music.
It also used a "tree" of Indo-European languages to trace the descent of shared tales to see how far they could be demonstrated to go back in time.
Dr Tehrani explained: "We used a toolkit that we borrowed from evolutionary biology called phylogenetic comparative methods. This enables you to reconstruct the past in the absence of physical evidence.
"We've excavated information about our story-telling history, using information that's been preserved through the mechanism of inheritance, so in that sense they embody their own history.
"By comparing the folk tales that we find in different cultures and knowing something about the historical relationships among those cultures, we can make inferences about the stories that would have been told by their common ancestors," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
The Benefits of Fairy Tales
Fairy Tales are essential stories for childhood. These stories are more than just happily ever after, they portray real moral lessons thru characters and virtue shown in the stories. They do not only captivate the imagination of young minds, but also enhances their creativity and reasoning skills. A child learns a lot by simply listening to these amazing stories. It also creates a special parent-child bond, when parents read stories to their children.
Fairy tales may bring children to a fantasy land but as they grow, the moral truths of these stories remain in their hearts and minds.
Not all parents believe in the importance of fairy tales for kids. But studies show that fairy tales bring significant positive results in the development of a young mind.
Fairy Tales are also fun and can bring about many benefits to your children; here are a few of them:
1. Early Literacy Development
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” ― Albert Einstein
Storytelling plays an important role in Early Literacy development. It acts as an essential building block to literacy. Children’s imaginations are further enhanced through listening to fairy tales. You can engage children to discuss how the fantasy land or amazing worlds from these stories can be different or the same from our real world. Through such interaction with your children, it will help them express their ideas easily.
Studies also show that regular storytelling activities can help broaden a child’s vocabulary.
2. Positive Problem Solving Skills
Children learn from the characters in the stories and this helps them connect the situation with their own lives. The stories show children how to have a positive outlook amidst any anxieties, battles and problems in life. It also teaches them critical thinking skills.
3. Building Resilience in Children
The world today can be seen as frightening place. Many families and most specifically children can undergo tremendous stress. In such situation, children need to be aware that bad things happen to everyone. Fairy tales can help them develop emotional resiliency by helping them connect the stories to real life issues where most of the time the hero triumphs. These stories show them that we all go through life challenges and that they must always be prepared and believe that they can succeed in life.
4. Cultural Literacy
Reading Fairy tales to children or storytelling is not only a foundation to literacy development but also give emphasis to various cross cultural values and behaviors.
5. Fairy Tales teaches the Basic of a Story
Fairy Tales are great tools for teaching kids about story development, conflict resolution, the development of characters, heroes and villains and simply broadening their imagination. Furthermore, it helps them differentiate fiction to non-fiction stories.
Whilst often forgotten, story tales should be considered as timeless. As parents and teachers it is a good idea to research ways you can introduce this genre to children and allow them to enjoy the stories you, your parents, grandparents and so on, have maintained as part of the story telling tradition of our cultures.