CNN Article: Some fairy tales go back thousands of years, study says by Don Melvin

CNN put fairy tales on the front page this week with the article, Some fairy tales go back thousands of years, study says by Don Melvin.

From the article:

Read "Jack and the Beanstalk" to your kids this evening, and you are probably putting them in touch with human sentiments that are thousands of years old.

Same goes if you read them "Beauty and the Beast," or maybe "Rumpelstiltskin."

A new study has found that classic fairy tales may be "much older than previously believed," one of the authors, Jamshid Tehrani of the UK's Durham University, said Wednesday. Tehrani wrote the study with Sara Graca da Silva of the New University of Lisbon, in Portugal.

Click through the article link to read more--there's not much in the article, but the study link offers the full study. It is dense but makes for interesting reading.

And, of course, this isn't brand new theory. Try Fairytale in the Ancient World by Graham Anderson for one book about fairy tales before Straparola, Basile, and Perrault that is more readable than the study for the lay reader. The topics aren't the same, but the intent is similar.

I liked the illustrations, too, and wanted to share them before they disappear into the internet ether.