Posted on 09/06/2009 9:48:41 AM PDT by decimon
They have been told as bedtime stories by generations of parents, but fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood may be even older than was previously thought.
A study by anthropologists has explored the origins of folk tales and traced the relationship between varients of the stories recounted by cultures around the world.
The researchers adopted techniques used by biologists to create the taxonomic tree of life, which shows how every species comes from a common ancestor.
Dr Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I would go with that suspicion.
Hoodie ping.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne-Thompson_classification_system
It seems these researchers are falling into the numerologist trap. The numerologist goes looking for numbers to pop up, certain numbers are lucky, certain are unlucky, and with so many numbers floating around you are bound to come across them again and a again. It’s much like when you buy a new car; all of sudden you start seeing more of your new car on the road - its not that the prevalence of that model has suddenly spiked just cause you bought one, it only seem that there’s more because you are now paying attention.
Getting around to the issue of fairy tales; just because you can see similarities between two stories does not make them related - especially when the similarities are as tangential as described in the article.
These tales go back as far as man began to grunt warnings to his offspring that a beast would eat them if they ventured too far from the cave.
If you are in for a very psychological, surreal and visually beautiful version of the Little Red Riding Hood story, try the movie “The Company of Wolves”, starring Angela Lansbury.
It is just swollen with symbolic meanings, and no easy answers. It is not for children at all. A memorable movie.
That has to be part of this. The messages of the tales are universal.
Thanks. But if she solves a murder...
That would be far too easy. TCOW is not going to be a movie you will be comfortable with saying “you understand”, even after several viewings. But the original RRH story is wide open to interpretation as well.
Coincidentally, I’m re-reading a book on fairytales by the Jungian psychotherapist.author Marie Louise von Franz — “Shadow & Evil in Fairytales” where she refutes this anthroplogoical idea that fairytales are universal.
Bruno Bettelheim’s “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales” was a groundbreaking book in this area. He demonstrates how fairy tales were used to help children of different ages cope with their baffling emotions and anxieties. “Beauty and the Beast”, for example, was aimed at older girls who in a few years might be married to a much older man and obliged to leave her parents and live in his house. Other stories were aimed at much younger kids.
He does touch on why certain numbers are significant in fairy tales: Three is important to the child because it is the trinity of the family: mom and dad with the child at the center. Seven crops up a lot because it is the number of planets that could be seen with the naked eye (this is why the number 7 is considered lucky).
““I have tried to show that tales relevant to our adaptation to the environment and survival are stored in our brains and we consistently use them for all kinds of reference points.”
“That has to be part of this. The messages of the tales are universal.”
Maybe, but I was never tempted to talk with strange wolves in dark forests even before ever being told this tale.
From which we may extrapolate your having some familiar wolves in dark forests. ;-)
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This must be vindication for Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. Thanks decimon. |
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Some versions were studied more than others.
This must be vindication for Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.......
Yes! Yes!
I study folk tales from all over the world, cause I enjoy them mostly. It’s a misconception to think that these are stories for kids only. These are stories people told each other, often to mixed crowds of adults and children, especially in days before books and theater and other entertainments were common, but even afterwards.
They do grow and evolve, I suspect, similarly to the way that folk songs and even urban legends do...A person retelling something will add their own touch or make it more to the hearer’s experience or preference, and so on and so on...It’s really a neat study to chase down variants and see how they adapt/evolve/get recycled.
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