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Fairy Tales Uncovered & Rediscovered

kamalktk

kamalktk

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/05/five-hundred-fairytales-discovered-germany

A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.
...
 
It was reported in the Forgotten History Thread on 6th March by somebody or other. :p
 
Should definitely be in the folklore section, though. :)

What an amazing find! Just think of the possible comparisons that can be done between folk tales we already know about and this new batch. Much could be learned about ancient oral traditions that have otherwise been lost to the mists of time.
 
Yep, I certainly missed it the first time round. This is very exciting.
 
Exciting find. I am a fan of fairy tales and folk tales.
 
ramonmercado said:
kamalktk said:
:cry:
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Be of good cheer: better that it be reported twice than not at all.
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Don't worry. I often find things and go "yay! I can post this!" only to find I've been beaten to it. I thought I had a scoop this time. :)
 
I always enjoy tracing analogues of stories as far back as possible. Tracing back lines of descent relies a lot on the greater reliability of oral transmission than written. It has been said that few stories don't have ancestors in the Jatakas of Buddhism. These are said to go back to the 3rd Century BC and include versions of tales we still call Aesop's Fables.

It is almost certainly an illusory freedom we experience when we tell a story. Are we pre-wired for stories in a Chomskyan manner or do we absorb the proper structures from early story-telling experiences? I am sure that narrative-starvation has a negative effect on concentration-spans later in life. :(
 
I suspect that some, not all, of the older traditional fairy stories may have started out as tales of the Gods, Nature Spirits (see some of the semi-fairy tale stories of the adventures of the Greek, Norse, or Indian Gods, Demi-Gods, giants, trolls, Nature Spirits, etc.), and either became increasingly garbled over time, or reflect an ancient tradition of wonder tales of the ancestors.

Stories, like the Forest dweller stories recorded by the Grimms, or Orcadian tales of the Silky folk, are pretty obviously culturally specific. Reflecting a very ancient, established and stable way of life, passed down over many generations.
 
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.

In the 19th Century, authors the Brothers Grimm believed many of the fairy tales they popularised 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.

Durham University anthropologist Dr Jamie Tehrani, who worked with folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva, from the New University of Lisbon, 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."

The study, which was published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, employed phylogenetic analysis, which was developed to investigate evolutionary relationships between species.

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 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.

Dr Tehrani 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."

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-35358487
 
GNC said:
Are fairy tales as old as the Old Testament, then? Not that I'm saying there's a connection. OK, I am.
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J. G. Frazer's Folklore in the Old Testament is your man for that! :cooll:

The antiquity of folktales was already known. The Victorians had the frisson of discovering ancient Pali analogues of Aesop's Fables, previously attributed to a deformed Greek slave.

So far as I can tell, the new research predicates common ancestory for these stories and suggests a date earlier than any texts. We used to be satisfied with phrases such as "deep in the mists of time." Can that mist be lifting? :confused:
 
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JamesWhitehead said:
So far as I can tell, the new research predicates common ancestory for these stories and suggests a date earlier than any texts. We used to be satisfied with phrases such as "deep in the mists of time." Can that mist be lifting? :confused:
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"Once upon a time..." used to be sufficient. Now it'll be "Around 3355B.C., there were three little pigs..."
 
Three forgotten women who collected and wrote fairy tales.

In the ongoing success story of the Grimms' fairytales, repopularized by big film corporations such as Disney, women who collected and wrote fairytales have long been overlooked.

Three such authors were Karoline von Woltmann, Carmen Sylva, and Laura Gonzenbach. Their stories are a far cry from the Grimms," asserting women's agency and addressing their needs.

1. Karoline von Woltmann (1782–1847)​

Born the daughter of a Prussian privy councilor in Berlin and highly educated, Woltmann spent most of her life writing historical fiction as well as works on social propriety. In these works, Woltmann presented herself in a light that would not be seen as particularly enlightened in our time. She endorses a gendered division of societal roles, and advocates for the importance of marriage as a societal institution.

But her fantastical writings give us a more nuanced insight into her views. In Der Mädchenkrieg (The Girls' War), from her collection Volkssagen der Böhmen (Folk Tales of the Bohemians, 1815), Woltmann retells a bohemian legend following the death of the legendary queen Libuše.

2. Carmen Sylva (1843–1916)​

Elisabeth zu Wied—more widely known under her pen name, Carmen Sylva—was a German princess who, through the coronation of her husband Carol I, became the first queen of Romania in 1881.

The new dynasty, however, got off to a troubled start. Their rule was repeatedly questioned, and the queen and king faced a series of droughts and social unrest. It was during this time that Sylva published Pelesch-Märchen (Peleş Fairy Tales, 1882)—a collection of 12 fairytales, largely of her own invention.

In these stories, Sylva fashions herself as a mothering "poet queen" who, by befriending the Romanian river Peleş and writing down its stories, is able to compile a collection of fairytales taken directly from the Romanian landscape's mouth. The tales function as a guide to the most prominent features of the landscape of the Peleş region. ...

3. Laura Gonzenbach (1842–1878)​

Very little is known about Laura Gonzenbach's life and circumstances. According to the few sources that exist, she was born into a Swiss-German mercantile family in Messina, in Sicily. Gonzenbach was highly educated and spoke multiple languages. Much of her young life was spent in the rural countryside of Sicily, where she was most likely taught the Sicilian dialect by servants as one of her first languages.

It was for this reason that the prominent German fairy tale scholar Otto Hartwig approached her and asked her to collect and translate local fairy tales for him to publish in a collection—the Sicilianische Märchen (Sicilian Fairy Tales, 1870). ...

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-forgotten-women-wrote-fairytales-subverted.html
 
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