Fairytales are thousands of years old? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

This is a controversial approach to folktale analysis, but it rests on largely sound bedrock. Jamshid J. Tehrani and Sara Graça da Silva are using what they call "phylogenetic analysis," which is a fancy way of saying that they are borrowing the approach used for reconstructing the history of gene sequences.

The link that /u/Searocksandtrees kindly provided includes a detailed background into the question you are asking, so no need to reproduce it here. The points are as follows:

Early European folklorists recognized that people were telling the same stories repeatedly, and they organized these into an index of "types," meaning independent stories each with a unique plot. These stories were different from place to place, but they were similar enough that they seemed to hang together historically.

This model has been challenged over the years by scholars who have argued that the "types" are illusions, but many folklorists continue to adhere to the idea that people were repeating folktales that reached back to some historical period. According to this line of thought, the age of each type is different and analysis of variants spread geographically, augmented by historical examples, can provide the life history of each folktale type including its mutations and point of origin and original form.

Some tale types have ancient examples: Type 313 manifests in the story of Jason and Argonauts; Type 318, the Two Brothers, appears in a 1200 BCE Egyptian text. These sorts of ancient examples are not universal across the spectrum of the some 1000 European tale types, but the examples nevertheless give a hint as to the age of at least some of the types.

What Tehrani and da Silva are doing is to combine genetic methodology with really cool graphic images that provide a convincing presentation as they break down all the various motifs and fixtures of language to arrive at a history of diffusion and mutation, much like genetic theorists do with the study of genetic populations. The work of these two folklorists is extremely impressive, but we need to proceed with caution since they are not working with genetic information, and it is easy to seduced by really cool graphics. These scholars have are arguing that they have figured out how to do what the Finnish Historic Geographic Method (see the link to the other discussion) suggested was needed more than a century ago.

So in the simplest of terms, let's consider your questions:

What is the study saying? It is suggesting that some folktale types are thousands of years old and with a method drawing from genetic analysis, it is possible to determine what the original narrative was and where and when it was told.

What do they mean when they say a story is old? They are saying - following a lead established by Jacob Grimm and then the Finns - and hundreds of folklorists after that, that folktale types can be very old. This conclusion is contested by some who deny the existence of types, and even for true believers, certainly not all of the 1000 European folktale types have ancient roots, but the stories of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, and many of the others you probably know, have old roots, and some of these apparently have ancient roots. As they were told over the generations, they changed, and as they diffused to new places, they mutated to suit their new environments, but the stories are traditional and survive - at least along this line of thought.

Is this theory taken seriously? Yes, it is to be taken seriously. Is it to be accepted? That's harder to say. I take it seriously (and I like this approach very much), but a good dose of skepticism is warranted.

Does that help?