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THE WORLD OF WRITING
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Researchers dig deep for fairy tale history
University researchers think that fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast can be traced back thousands of years, and not just to the 16th and 17th centuries as is widely believed.
They found some tales were older than the earliest literary records, with one dating back to the Bronze Age.
Durham University anthropologist Dr Jamie Tehrani – who worked with folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva, from the New University of Lisbon – told the BBC: ‘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.’
Dr Jamie also said that 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 more than 5,000 years ago, while ‘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.’
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April 2016
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