Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers
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Re: Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers
#2What's that quote from the movie producer? "All the good stories have already been told, it's just a matter of how you tell it"? Something like that.
There are volumes and volumes of books about how every story can be described by just a few "proto" stories. It's not entirely surprising that there were proto stories before the written word.
Re: Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers
#3What's that quote from the movie producer? "All the good stories have already been told, it's just a matter of how you tell it"? Something like that. There are volumes and volumes of books about how every story can be described by just a few "proto" stories. It's not entirely surprising that there were proto stories before the written word.
This comment is not very original.
Re: Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers
#4Carl Jung talks about a collective unconscious and I have to say that I find it absolutely fascinating that our symbols are so durable and our desires petrified.
We have a core psychology of what it means to be human that remains unchanged and so its stories remain unchanged.
Re: Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers
#5I have a copy of the collected stories of the Brothers Grimm from my childhood, but when I was young I skipped the preface (and to be honest, most of the "Christian" stories, which I found boring, preferring instead the fairy tales with blood, monsters, witches and the prototypical "the youngest of three brothers gets the princess/treasure"), but when I was older I did finally read the preface and was surprised to learn the Brothers Grimm were researchers, not authors of children's stories. These guys weren't trying to collect stories for their entertainment value, but they were trying to analyze European folk tales instead!
Re: Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers
#6Carl Jung talks about a collective unconscious and I have to say that I find it absolutely fascinating that our symbols are so durable and our desires petrified. We have a core psychology of what it means to be human that remains unchanged and so its stories remain unchanged.
Humans do indeed love a narrative...start telling a story, particularly one with an unusual character(s) in an interesting situation, then stop telling it and see what happens...you'll be prompted: "Go on, what happened next?"....at our core I think we're very hungry for knowledge, and eventually the closure provided when a story comes to a satisfactory ending...
For the majority of our time on the planet the oral tradition was all that was available to us...
I think the simpler the elements of a story are--e.g., good vs evil, good eventually wins, etc., (easily remember-able) the greater the odds are that it will be passed down through generations, or the ages, with changes and embellishments...
Re: Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers
#7Carl Jung talks about a collective unconscious and I have to say that I find it absolutely fascinating that our symbols are so durable and our desires petrified. We have a core psychology of what it means to be human that remains unchanged and so its stories remain unchanged.
I think that they're glossing over the fact that many/most of these old narratives have been viewed as extremely difficult to relate to by different generations in different ways, all of which have rewritten, simplified, changed the morals of, and bowdlerized them in hundreds of different ways and abandoned the originals. Many/most of the Grimm stories were virtually unknown in their original forms over the past century - until they were published again over the past 5 years or so.
edit: of course, I'm calling the Grimm publications the "original forms" here - I'm sure that most were unrecognizable even then from whatever they had been when they were first told (if they were ever told a first time rather than just evolving from nothing through a continual telephone-game/repurposing process.)
Re: Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers
#8I have a copy of the collected stories of the Brothers Grimm from my childhood, but when I was young I skipped the preface (and to be honest, most of the "Christian" stories, which I found boring, preferring instead the fairy tales with blood, monsters, witches and the prototypical "the youngest of three brothers gets the princess/treasure"), but when I was older I did finally read the preface and was surprised to le…
Not just researchers of stories, but also talented linguists who saw evidence of the lineage between different languages, and some of the rules of how words and sounds moved between them.
Re: Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers
#9I have a copy of the collected stories of the Brothers Grimm from my childhood, but when I was young I skipped the preface (and to be honest, most of the "Christian" stories, which I found boring, preferring instead the fairy tales with blood, monsters, witches and the prototypical "the youngest of three brothers gets the princess/treasure"), but when I was older I did finally read the preface and was surprised to le…
These stories weren't meant to be children's stories. They just became popular as such and have been edited to make them more child friendly to the point that with Disney they're hardly recognizable anymore.
Re: Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers
#10The Australian aborigines have told the same stories for 10,000 years:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-t...
The same for India:
http://www.earthporm.com/5-mind-blowing-underwater-cities/
See #3.
Most people don't realize just how deep human history is. Words people use every day are ~2000 years old. e.g. "via", goes back to the Roman times.