SHOCK! HORROR! THE STORY OF BEAUTY AND
THE BEAST COULD BE 4000 YEARS OLD!
That story was in the
newspapers, it was all over Facebook, people sent me links to articles… it
featured on the Today Programme where an incredulous John Humphreys interviewed
someone on the subject.
So what was it all about?
Dr Jamie Tehrani and his colleagues at Durham University have
been doing research into this subject using a method called Comparative Phylogenetic Analysis and he’d come
up with the findings that some tales might be 6000 years old!
(I won’t
go into the details of the method, it’s long and complicated, but you can read
all about it for yourself on these two sites:
Is it, though, such an incredible
finding? Didn’t we know, or at least suspect that all the time?
Historian Michael Wood in his recent TV
series ‘The Story of China’ showed a storyteller telling a 4000 year old story.
“That’s being told in the very place it happened” he said, “We know that
because archaeologists have excavated those fields and found the evidence.” He
didn’t find it surprising that a story could survive orally for that long even
though those tales were all banned during the Cultural Revolution of the mid
20th Century. They sprang back up with no difficulty once they became
acceptable again. So if it’s possible in
China why not in Europe?
Tehrani
himself said in his paper “Wilhelm Grimm (one of the famous Brothers
Grimm to whom we owe many of the best known European folk tales) argued that
the traditional German tales that he and his brother Jacob had compiled were
remnants of an ancient Indo-European cultural tradition that stretched from
Scandinavia to South Asia”. Many people said this wasn’t possible. They argued
that the peasantry wasn’t capable of creating such stories from scratch and
that they must all have been composed by some literate member of the gentry
before being taken up orally.
I love singing ballads and, over the
years, have done many of them. A particularly magical and ancient-seeming one
which I’ve recorded but never performed live is The Outlandish Knight (Child#4)
In
it a mysterious, foreign (or
other-worldly?) ‘knight’ comes wooing, promises all kinds of wonderful things,
and the young lady elopes with him; when they get to a distant riverbank he
orders her to dismount from her horse and take off her clothes:
“For it’s six pretty maidens I have
drowned here
And
thou the seventh will be”
but, as in many
stories, she’s a clever girl; she tells him to turn his back while she disrobes and when
he’s not looking she pushes him into the river:
“Lie there, lie there, you false hearted
man
Lie
there instead of me,
If
it’s six pretty maidens you have drowned here
Then
the seventh has drownéd thee.”
 | |
| The Beast from Beauty & the Beast |
In his book Folk Song in England A.L.Lloyd devotes several pages to the
ballad and points out that the story has been found right across Europe for
many centuries and the further east you go the older the song seems to be. A
scene which is missing from most British versions but is found in the
Continental ones is this: at some point on their ride they stop beneath a tree.
They dismount and she takes his head in her lap to delouse him (very romantic!)
but not before he has warned her not to look up into the tree where hang either
his blood-stained weapons or the heads of his previous victims. (Shades of
Bluebeard or Mr Fox!)
This image can be found in many Hungarian and Slovakian churches
although the hero is the Hungarian king St Ladislas, but sometimes he is
depicted as a Tartar warrior...
Lloyd claims that the oldest depiction of the same scene is found on a
bronze sword scabbard dating from 300BCE, found in Siberia—a warrior and his
lady lie under a 9-branched tree by the river with their horses standing near
by.
Link to PETE SINGS THE OUTLANDISH KNIGHT
 |
| Jason fights the skeleton men who spring from the seeds he plants |
And how about Scarborough Fair
or The Elfin Knight (Child#2) ?
When I was about 9 years old I
was given a book called The Golden Fleece by M.W.Jennings as a school prize. It
was one of those I read over and over so when I heard Scarborough Fair (the
full version, not Paul Simon’s truncated one) I immediately recognised the
image of ploughing the sea shore:
Tell him to
find me an acre of land… between the salt water and the sea strand.
Tell him to
plough it with a ram’s horn… and sow it all over with one pepper corn.
Tell him to
reap it with a sickle of leather… and tie it all up with a peacock’s feather.
In my book it says:
“Then Medeia,
the witch maiden, told Jason what he would have to do, to win the fleece. First
he would have to tame two fierce bulls with brass feet and fire for breath, and
make them plough a field. Then he would have to sow serpents' teeth in the
field. Out of each tooth would spring up an armed man, and he would have to
fight with all these armed men....”
In the famous Ray Harryhausen film the armed men
became skeletons as in the picture above.
The story of Jason and the Argonauts goes back
to when? Many millennia… if it is based on true events it must have happened
before 1000BCE.
Link to PETE SINGS TO SCARBOROUGH FAIR
 |
| Jack and the Beanstalk: 4000 years old? |
On a much more everyday level there are
many things which have survived for thousands of years and which we don’t
question: I live in Belper, a name which comes from the Norman French
Beaurepaire, so that name has survived 1000 years. One of my favourite places to walk is the
Chevin, which is large hilly ridge just up the road from Belper. Chevin is a
modern spelling of Cefn, a name still found in Wales, which was the old
Brittonic name for a wooded ridge. There have been no Britons in Belper to
speak that language since Roman times but the name survived and was inherited
by the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans and now us. Our local river,
which runs past the foot of the Chevin, is the Derwent. There are several River
Derwents in England [as well as Derwentwater in the Lake District] and it is
thought that it might be a word for a river, or just for water, which pre-dates
any known language. So many millennia old…
Next time I’m asked “How old are the
stories you tell?” - a question I’ve been asked quite often, I’ll now be able
to say, with scientific evidence to back me up, that some are 6000 years old or
more! Very satisfying.
And what was the oldest story which
Tehrani was able to find? So far it is one we could call The Smith and
the Devil. In it a blacksmith,
or more accurately a worker in metals, sells his soul to
the Devil or some other supernatural being in order to gain supernatural
abilities, particularly the
ability to weld things together inseparably. Once he has mastered the power the
smith welds the evil one to a rock or mountain so that he never has to keep his
part of the bargain.
This is an idea which is
obviously always relevant and updateable. It’s not that different to Prometheus
stealing fire from the gods, Paganini
selling his soul for his fiddling ability or Robert Johnson’s bargain to
become the best ever blues guitarist. Tehranni
estimates the tale to go back 6,000 years into the Bronze Age when it would have been very relevant.
Richard Martin, who was one
of the people who sent material my way for this article, has a video of himself
telling a version of this ancient story. It surprised me because it’s one I do
and know as Jack o’Lantern or Jack the Bad Tempered Blacksmith. I can’t
remember where I learned the story but it is so close to Richard’s (although it
has grown a bit longer and more detailed) that I wonder whether it was from
Richard—or did he get it from me? The storytelling world id very small!
See Richard’s version at THE SMITH AND THE DEVIL
And please have
a look at the previous postings below and if you have any comments please post
them. I'd welcome your (constructive) comments and would be very pleased if you
did sign up to 'follow' me!
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