What’s The Story?

Abstract

Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continuities evident in the oral traditions associated with different cultures. According to the ‘historic-geographic’ school, it is possible to classify similar tales into ‘‘international types’’ and trace them back to their original archetypes. However, critics argue that folktale traditions are fundamentally fluid, and that most international types are artificial constructs. Here, these issues are addressed using phylogenetic methods that were originally developed to reconstruct evolutionary relationships among biological species, and which have been recently applied to a range of cultural phenomena. The study focuses on one of the most debated international types in the literature: ATU 333, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. A number of variants of ATU 333 have been recorded in European oral traditions, and it has been suggested that the group may include tales from other regions, including Africa and East Asia. However, in many of these cases, it is difficult to differentiate ATU 333 from another widespread international folktale, ATU 123, ‘The Wolf and the Kids’. To shed more light on these relationships, data on 58 folktales were analysed using cladistic, Bayesian and phylogenetic network-based methods. The results demonstrate that, contrary to the claims made by critics of the historic-geographic approach, it is possible to identify ATU 333 and ATU 123 as distinct international types. They further suggest that most of the African tales can be classified as variants of ATU 123, while the East Asian tales probably evolved by blending together elements of both ATU 333 and ATU 123. These findings demonstrate that phylogenetic methods provide a powerful set of tools for testing hypotheses about cross-cultural relationships among folktales, and point towards exciting new directions for research into the transmission and evolution of oral narratives. Citation: Tehrani JJ (2013) The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood. PLoS ONE 8(11): e78871. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078871 Editor: R. Alexander Bentley, Bristol University, United Kingdom Received July 30, 2013; Accepted September 20, 2013; Published November 13, 2013 Copyright: 2013 Jamshid J. Tehrani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The author was supported by an RCUK Fellowship during a part of the time in which the research was carried out. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: jamie.tehrani@durham.ac.uk Introduction The publication of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales (1812–1814) [1] two hundred years ago sparked enormous public and academic interest in traditional stories told among ‘‘the common people’’, and helped establish folklore as a field for serious academic inquiry. Inspired by the Grimms’ methods, a new generation of researchers ventured outside the library and into the villages and households of the rural peasantry to collect colourful tales of magical beasts, wicked stepmothers, enchanted objects, and indefatigable heroes [2]. One of the most unexpected and exciting discoveries to emerge from these studies was the recurrence of many of the same plots in the oral traditions associated with different – and often widely separated – societies and ethnic groups. Thus, the Brothers Grimm noted that many of the ostensibly ‘‘German’’ folktales which they compiled are recognisably related to stories recorded in Slavonic, Indian, Persian and Arabic oral traditions [3]. These similarities have attracted the attention of folklorists, literary scholars, anthropologists, cognitive scientists and others for a variety of reasons: For example, cognate tales in other cultures have been studied to try and reconstruct the origins and forms of classic western fairy tales before they were first written down [2] [4]. Other researchers have examined the distributions of common plot elements within and across regions to make inferences about past migration, crosscultural contact, and the impact of geographical distance and language barriers on cultural diffusion [5] [6]. Last, it has been suggested that patterns of stability and change in stories can furnish rich insights into universal and variable aspects of the human experience, and reveal how psychological, social and ecological processes interact with one another to shape cultural continuity and diversity [7] [8] [9]. Unfortunately, since folktales are mainly transmitted via oral rather than written means, reconstructing their history and development across cultures has proven to be a complex challenge. To date, the most ambitious and sustained effort in this area has been carried out by folklorists associated with the so-called ‘‘historic-geographic’’ school, which was established toward the end of the nineteenth century [10]. These researchers have sought to classify similar folktales from different oral literatures into distinct ‘‘international types’’ based on consistencies in their themes, plots and characters. The most comprehensive and up-todate reference work in this field, the Aarne-Uther-Thompson (ATU) index, identifies more than two thousand international types distributed across three hundred cultures worldwide [11]. Exponents of the historic-geographic school believed that each international type could be traced back to an original ‘‘archetype’’ tale that was inherited from a common ancestral population, or spread across societies through trade, migration and conquest. Over time, the tales’ original forms were then adapted to suit different cultural norms and preferences, giving rise to locally distinct ‘‘ecotypes’’ [5]. The historic-geographic method sought to reconstruct this process by assembling all the known variants of the international type and sorting them by region and chronology. Rare or highly localised forms were considered to be of likely PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 November 2013 | Volume 8 | Issue 11 | e78871 “The phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood” Jamshid J. Tehrani, PLoS ONE, 8, e78871, 2013. [11]