I 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!
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.
Charles Perrault in France was the originator here, but most countries had their version of the Grimm Brothers. The Czech Republic, for example, had Bozena Nemcova who did similar research of Czech stories at the same time as the Grimms in Germany.
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.
That's not remotely true. Many of these stories were specifically to protect children. If you can't watch your children all the time, you can't just tell them, "Don't go too close to the water." They'll go anyway. So you tell them, "There are Wassermen (German) / Vodnik (Czech) who will grab you by the feet and pull you in."
When my daughter was pretty young we were walking on the sidewalk beside a road. There was an unfortunate squirrel that hand not made the crossing alive, and died in a rather gory fashion. Rather than sheltering her from the cruelty of death I told her that this squirrel didn't listen to its parents and played in the road. The imagery was powerful enough that she 'self-policed' rather well and kept herself and friends away from the road unless an adult was helping them cross.
It's this same imagery we see in old tales like that. Vivid and terrifying creatures and events that apply enough fear to curb our curiosity in places that it might get the better of us.
Others tell you that your family is evil and you should seek advice from talking animals instead.
But the original was published as "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" or "Children's and Household Tales," so you're right that the Grimm's fully expected these would be read to or by kids.
Finished reading Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid to my daughter just last night. That ending was brutal. Not at all what my daughter or I were expecting having seen the Disney film.
I'm not sure because it's a Spanish translation. I have it somewhere in the house, but I think it might be the Children's and Household Tales. It has most well-known fairy tales as well as some more overtly "Christian" tales, which as I mentioned I skipped as a child and never found the inclination to read as a grown-up.
The folk tales are both entertaining and gruesome. I remember one story where the father of a family is forced to decapitate his wife and sons, but then there is something with magic blood (I don't remember the details) and when he sticks their heads together, they come alive as if nothing had happened.
My favorites however were not the blood-soaked stories, but the stories where the resourceful younger brother of three -- or sometimes a veteran soldier who decided to make something of his life -- would either cheat others or, alternatively, reach success by being kind to a mischievous gnome or a mysterious old lady.
I can guess what you mean by "anti-women" -- though I remember there were also female heroines in the stories -- but what evidence do you have that they deliberately placed an anti-women slant in the stories (a slant which I assume you'll argue wasn't originally in these folk tales?).
I think folk tales reflect the prejudices of the time. So yes, often ugliness meant evil, and old ladies were witches, and young women would be expected to be virtuous and fair-looking. But sometimes being kind to the old lady in the woods was the right thing to do, and sometimes fair-looking young women were spoiled and selfish.
I am none too convinced by the evidence of the Australian aborigines stories. They are so vague they could just be made up.
To give you an idea how unlikely a story would survive being passed down for 10,000 years is, the Tasmanian aborigines lost the ability to fish and and even start fire [1]. Given the critical nature of this information to survival how likely is it that a random story with no survival value would last 10,000 years?
Pre-euro Australia was more like Europe with different tribes/nations that shared common characteristics yet still had their own languages and cultures.
Compare and contrast the difference in sophistication between the Romans and the gauls or germanic tribes around 200AD, they would seem totally different worlds. It could have been similar in Aus.
Other indigenous Australian groups invented the boomerang - first ever practical use of aerofoil technology - precursor of modern flight and the woomera which launches a spear around 700-800m with accuracy.
From what I remember their art was somewhat codified so it could almost be "read", this would make it easier to share information across time and place.
If you have groups on two ends of the continent sharing very similar stories, then at least you'd have to allow the reasonable possibility it's more than just random noise.
The boomerang was not invented in Australia [1]. Woomeras don't allow you to throw a spear 800m (200m at most). These were not invented in Australia either [2]. Both are really ancient technologies.
As for different cultures sharing the same stories is no more surprising than people in England and China sharing similar stories. All pre-agricultural people have somewhat similar lives so we should expect they have similar stories and myths. Occam's razor should rule here.
I'm out of my element here, but presumably the fact that they're able to tell stories implies that the fishing knowledge became no longer necessary for survival. It seems completely reasonable that entertaining stories would have more staying power than uneccesary procedural knowledge.
Not been able to fish or make fire in a place like Tasmania if you are living a hunter gather lifestyle is quite a loss.
We know from the archaeological record that the Tasmanian aboriginal population was able to fish for thousands of years after the sea level rose and cutoff Tasmanian from mainland Australia. No one really know why, but after thousands of years of fishing they somehow lost the knowledge of how to catch fish. If something as useful as fishing is lost (the seas around Tasmania teem with fish) then how likely is it that a folk tale would be passed down for 10,000 years by oral tradition.
Bit of a tangent, but I enjoy the fact that "yeah" predates "yes". The latter is derived from the former (which is obviously cognate to German "ja", etc.)
The Romans also had writing. Writing helps a lot in stabilizing a language. Take a look at English before it was written down - it changed constantly and rapidly.
10,000 years is 500 generations. How many generations of family stories do you have? I have zero from further back than my great-grandparents, that's 3 generations ago, let alone 500.
The claim of 10,000 year old stories is very extraordinary, and so extraordinary evidence is necessary to be convincing.
Or perhaps some stories may be so archetypical that they get reinvented repeatedly. Stories that share some similar plot points does not mean they must have a common origin.
Given that Europe is a similar natural landscape: forest, river, mountain, and has the same wildlife: bears, pigs, wolves, and that it was sparsely populated by modern standards with travel going fastest by horse if you even had a horse, I can see why there are common threads throughout. The dangers were the same, the outcome the same, the weapons of defense the same. The common origin I would assume, is no more than common experiences.
Seriously, there are guys researching this topic for years, applying sophisticated linguistic analyses and then finally propose a novel hypothesis to the world - then comes a guy on the internet and after a quick snap of their thoughts destroys their work and claims they're wrong, it is no more than common experiences.
Reminds me of all those internet scientists that ask "but what about the sun?" when the topic of AGW comes up. No shit, Sherlock, never thought about that blinding thing in the sky before!
Sorry for the rant and attacking you, but sometimes a bit of humility is warranted when it comes to science.
Yeah, there are a lot a lot of people in universities wasting time and money while trying a make a name and career for themselves. I once studied literature, have you delved into the amount of BS people will write about Shakespeare just to come up with something original? Academia is an industry too.
But you know, a common ancestor who imparted the wisdom of ye olde wurld on to generations to come, like a LotR type sceanrio, that's not making the square evidence fit in a round hole. /sceptic
There is a theory that the common motif of a bear associated with the constellation Ursa Major may have been brought to the New World from Siberia during the Ice Age over 13,000 years ago.
"Its stars seem to have been called the Bear over nearly the whole of our continent when the first Europeans, of whom we have knowledge, arrived. They were known as far north as Point Barrow, as far east as Nova Scotia, as far west as the Pacific Coast, and as far south as the Pueblos."
- Stansbury Hagar, “The Celestial Bear”, The Journal of American Folklore (JAF), Apr.-Jun., 1900
"Occasional local names notwithstanding, the possibility of the bear as Ursa Major having originated independently is inconceivable. Classical Old World mythology is replete with the bear in its role as Ursa Major. Ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic all contain references to this motif."
- William B. Gibbon, “Asiatic Parallels in North American Star Lore: Ursa Major”, JAF, Jul.-Sep., 1964.
I'm skeptical. Bears used to be very commonplace and a big (literally) deal to anyone who lived in N. America. I don't find it inconceivable at all that bears would figure prominently in N. American spiritualism, which would include the stars.
Carl 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...
While the idea of a collective unconscious is romantic, the primary reason why fairytales date back so far is because the ancient Europeans practiced a culture that prized the ability to recite old poetry and stories. When you consider that there are so many variations on fairytales due to innovations in ora transmission, yet we are able to pretty much accurately piece together one editorially authoritative version of the Illiad, the ability for oral tradition to preserve stories doesn't seem so impressive anymore.
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.)
While the length of time these stories have survived is impressive, it doesn't seem so shocking that many stories would be passed on despite not having been written. I can imagine that even at the time they were collected by the Brothers Grimm, they were usually passed along orally, not on paper. I can't imagine the literacy rate was very high for most of that time.
What'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.
A related story featured on HN a couple of days ago [1]. I'll echo JonnieCache and recommend Jordan Peterson's lectures [2]. If you are concerned about investing the time in an entire lecture, check out the video "Dragons, Divine Parents, Heroes and Adversaries: A complete cosmology of being" [3]; it gives a high level overview of the content contained within his lectures. I believe 'Personality and its Transformations' (2014 series) followed by 'Maps of Meaning' (2015) to be the best approach, though I haven't yet had a chance to listen to the 2016 releases.
Jordan has uncanny ability to piece together observations on human behavior with science and mythology; expounding humanity's nuances, ticks and everyday common behavior through the lens of ancient mythology, evolution and ideas and theories by notable psychologists and philosophers.
Keep an open mind while listening, but also be prepared to think critically about many of his assumptions and assertions as Jordan takes a number of 'educated' leaps (and demands you follow) in regards to published studies and what they may infer, but the leaps are never illogical - just yet to be soundly proven.
Overall, listening to these lectures truly was a transformative experience for myself.
Take a walk in a Norwegian forest at twilight and marvel at how easily it is to see trolls in the roots of fallen trees. A lot of black twisted shapes against a darkening sky are like hallucinations as your mind tries to make sense of it, tries to assess the danger of the situation (wolves etc) and you begin looking for higher ground.
I would not be surprised if stories of other worldly beings aiding in the construction of the pyramids of Egypt long after the pyramids are gone, becomes another fairy tale or at least a derivative in part of that theory.
Religion and superstition - there has to be a story that is not true for there to be a True story. Goblins and evlves are not real but ghosts and demons and angels and gods are.
