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Paper Short Abstract:

How can digital folk archives be used to study the overlaps between modern folktales and their antecedents in Classical literature? Could an increased availability of regional archival data allow a new approach to the challenges of tracing the historical-geographical evolution of ancient narratives?

Paper Abstract:

In the 19th century, folklorists discovered that some internationally disseminated oral folktales closely resembled well-known narratives from Ancient Greek and Latin literature (such as Polyphemus, Cupid and Psyche, Oedipus and others), sparking an ongoing debate about whether folkloric variants and their Classical antecedents are genetically related. The ATU classification system provided a typological framework for identifying such overlaps. In the early 2000s, Graham Anderson and William Hansen used this classification to systematically detect correspondences between international folktales and Classical texts, identifying hundreds of parallels. Such typological comparisons between folktales and classical narratives, while not always genealogically linked, can shed light on both systems, and contribute to a better understanding of the historical-geographical evolution of some of the most famous and enduring narratives of the Western world.

However, there is still a lack of studies that verify the actual circulation of the ATU types studied by Anderson and Hansen in relation to the Classical literature in the areas once colonised by Greco-Latin civilisation and assess the extent to which their local variations in these areas affect textual comparisons with ancient literary texts.

This paper explores the benefits that the creation of a digital archive of modern folktales with ancient counterparts would bring to the study of the unwritten links between classical and folkloric narratives. It argues that greater access to data from Mediterranean areas, whose folkloric heritage remains little impacted by digitisation, could facilitate new approaches to tracing the diachronic development of longstanding Western narratives, potentially revolutionising folklore and literary studies.