The great and definitive discovery of the 19th century was the international spread of folktales and the great antiquity that must often be ascribed of them. These two weighty theses, which have been thoroughly borne out by later discoveries, made a closer examination of them an important and significant task even by itself. When the Grimm brothers tried to account for these remarkable facts, they introduced the hypothesis that these folktales had been handed down from a remote Indo-European past, and that they were relics of a common mythology of the Indo-European peoples. Their hypothesis was natural at a time when the mutual relationships of the Indo-European languages had just been discovered, and some common features had been found in the myths of various peoples.
Mahabharata
The hypothesis, the notion that the tales were relics of a common past, should be alive even yet, as a whole series of them can be shown to date back at last 3000 years, which fact proves it to be possible for tales from such a remote period to be handed down by oral tradition within one or several peoples.
Papyrus d'Orbiney
Moreover, the folktales have been invented and may be invented at any time, and that accordingly a lot of folktales must be of a considerably later date. This is self-evident and was, of course, also realized by the Grimm brothers. Their Indo-European theory was certainly not conceived as applying to more than a certain number of tales, specifically the fantastic chimera tales, which bore a certain resemblance to myths.
One of the reasons of the international spread of folktales is loans of tradition from other peoples. The Grimm brothers were inclined to deny the possibility of loans, apart from purely exceptional cases. However, it was an important task for future folktale studies to mark out the border line in this respect between Indo-European folktale tradition proper on one hand, and Mediterranean and other tradition on the other.
Grimm Brothers
In the end of the 19th century in Europe raised the interest for the folklore of non European peoples. Therefore, in England in 1894 published Georgian folktales translated by Marjory Wardrop. Edward Tylor, creator of the science of anthropology, was initiator of this edition. http://www.sacred-texts.com/asia/geft/index.htm
Marjory Wardrop (1869-1909)
Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917)
Now part of the history of folkloristic, mythological theory serves to illustrate the thesis that folklore interpretations are often as fantastic and fascinating as the folkloristic materials they claim to explain. However these errors created a base for the comparative studies of folktales.
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