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The Long Lives of Fairy Tales
- moneil971 8y agoInteresting use of Bayesian inference to prove the brothers Grimm were mostly plagiarists
- nikbackm 8y agoI thought it was well known that they collected existing tales rather than writing their own?
- irrational 8y agoThat was my understanding too. Is it plagiarism if they were totally upfront about what they were doing?
- pandesmos 8y agoAnd not only that, it’s always been my understanding that there was a major motivation of preservation. To record the spoken tales before they were lost.
- buovjaga 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Grimm#Methodology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Grimm#Methodology Quote: "According to scholars such as Ruth Bottigheimer and Maria Tatar, some of the tales probably originated in written form during the medieval period with writers such as Straparola and Boccaccio, but were modified in the 17th century and again rewritten by the Grimms. Moreover, Tatar writes that the brothers' goal of preserving and shaping the tales as something uniquely German at a time of French occupation was a form of "intellectual resistance" and, in so doing, they established a methodology for collecting and preserving folklore that set the model followed later by writers throughout Europe during periods of occupation."
- gumby 8y agoThey never pretended to have made up those stories. If you want a villain, consider Disney who tried (sometimes successfully in the US) to exert control of the use of fairytales by other parties after they'd made a film of one.
- goto11 8y agoIn what way? New adaptions of Snow White or Cinderella are done all the time.
- gumby 8y agoExactly, and to do new adaptations, interpretations etc is wonderful and perfectly legit. What Disney has done is sued over trademark claims on Snow White, Beauty and the Beast etc, trying to claim proprietary ownership of public domain stories, characters and ideas. Theese suits were expensive and not always successful so they eventually decided to stop explicitly mining the past and start developing their own characters (e.g. mermaid etc).
- goto11 8y agoThe Little Mermaid is not a Disney creation, it is a story by Hans Christian Andersen, as is The Snow Queen which Frozen is (very loosely) based on. You can't trademark a story or idea, but you can trademark a particular character design. You can make your own Cinderella interpretation as long as you don't copy the exact art and design made by someone else.
- moneil971 8y agoThe plagiarism reference was a joke! nothing is new and everyone is just retelling an old story, as Disney’s Beauty and the Beast sang, it’s a “tale as old as time”
- astura 8y agoThey collected, wrote down, and published well known German folktales of uncertain/indeterminable orgins, they never claimed they were original stories. The brothers had a preservationist goal.
- gumby 8y agoThere's also horizontal "translation" -- as a child I had a book which was plainly European fairy tales translated linguistically and culturally into India (e.g. a princess whose wicked stepmother forced her to separate rice and sand).
- buovjaga 8y agoI don't think there is a single folklorist who is convinced by this phylogenetic speculation. If you know some, I am eager to hear about them.
- QuercusMax 8y agoCan you expand on this? What are their alternate explanations?
- buovjaga 8y agoI guess you mean alternate proposals for the origin/dating of various tales. The cell.com article says: "Fourteen of the 76 tales, including Beauty and the Beast, were assigned a 50% or greater chance of having been present in the common ancestor of the entire western branch of the Indo-European languages. This group includes all of the Celtic, Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, and might have originated between around 6,800 years ago" This makes no sense as Beauty and the Beast is known to be literary in origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_and_the_Beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_and_the_Beast I have been following the work of Finnish folklorist and professor emerita Satu Apo, who has recently released a 400 page tome on the history of fairy tales. I have to get my hands on it as it apparently includes a section called "The rise or belly landing of phylogenetic fairy tale research?". I can translate some bits from the press release: https://www.epressi.com/tiedotteet/tiede-ja-tutkimus/mista-sadut-tulevat-uutuuskirja-selvittaa-tuttujen-prinsessasatujen-alkuperan.html https://www.epressi.com/tiedotteet/tiede-ja-tutkimus/mista-s... The oldest known variant of Cinderella is fantasy literature from 9th century China ("Ye Xian"). Sleeping Beauty comes from Perrault's Tales of Mother Goose (17th century). Snow White ("Richilde") comes from Johann Musäus's Volksmärchen der Deutschen (18th century).
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- danaris 8y agoBeauty and the Beast I'm skeptical about, but have no particular way to refute. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White were compiled in those works, not originally created there. Hell, "Volksmärchen" means "folk fairy tales." The very name tells you that Musäus didn't claim them as original creations, he was writing down what people had been telling each other for centuries orally.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoI wonder how many stories suffer "mutations" that break them from their previous incarnations. The article mentions "The Smith and The Devil", and speculates that metal-working technology would have been around at the time of its origin, but I'm not sure if that's any more likely than the profession of the protagonist changing over time. At the very least, in Russia there are many tales of Ivan outwitting the Devil, regardless of his profession. Maybe that's just a horizontal transfer and the story taking advantage of a previously unoccupied memetic niche...
- krapp 8y agoMany of these stories were part of oral traditions before being written down and "canonized" by certain authors (sometimes to Christianize existing pagan folklore, as happened with Norse mythology) so mutation seems likely across generations and local cultures.