ONCE upon a time there was a girl who was so sweet and kind that everyone loved her. So begins the story of Little Red Riding Hood. You may think you know it – but which version? In the tale told to you as a child, did Red Riding Hood outsmart the wolf, or did a local woodsman come to her rescue? Was her grandma retrieved alive from the wolf’s stomach or was she digested? Did the girl get into bed with the wolf? Were her misfortunes just bad luck, or was she asking for it?
People of every culture tell each other fairy tales and the same story often takes a variety of forms in different parts of the world. The universal appeal of these fantastical tales is frequently attributed to the idea that they contain cautionary messages: in the case of Little Red Riding Hood, to listen to your mother, not stray from the path, and avoid talking to strangers. “It might be what we find interesting about this story is that it’s got this survival-relevant information in it,” says anthropologist Jamie Tehrani at Durham University in the UK. But his research suggests otherwise. By exploring how fairy tales have changed and evolved as they spread between cultures, he believes he has discovered what truly makes them compelling.
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“We have this huge gap in our knowledge about the history and prehistory of storytelling, despite the fact that we know this genre is an incredibly ancient one,” says Tehrani. That hasn’t stopped anthropologists, folklorists and others devising theories to explain the appeal and importance of fairy tales in human society. Now Tehrani has found a way to test these ideas, borrowing a technique from evolutionary biologists.
To work out the evolutionary history, development and relationships among groups of organisms, biologists compare the characteristics of living species in a process called phylogenetic analysis. Tehrani has used the same approach to compare related versions of fairy tales to discover how they have evolved and which elements are most enduring.
His analysis focused on Little Red Riding Hood in its many guises, which include another Western fairy tale known as The Wolf and the Kids. Trawling academic collections for variants of these two tales and similar stories from Africa, East Asia and other regions, he ended up with 58 stories recorded from oral traditions. , he used the same methods to explore how they have changed over time.
First he tested some assumptions about which aspects of the story change least as it evolves, indicating their importance. Folklorists believe that events are more central to the story than characters – that visiting a relative, only to be met by a scary animal in disguise, is more fundamental than whether the visitor is a little girl or three siblings, or the animal is a tiger instead of a wolf.
Survival strategy
However, Tehrani found no significant difference in the rate of evolution of events compared with that of characters. “Certain events are very stable because we recognise them as being crucial to the story, but there are lots of other details that can evolve quite freely,” he says. Neither did his analysis support the theory that the middle section of a story is the most conserved part. He found no significant difference in the flexibility of events at the beginning, middle and end.
But the really big surprise came when he looked at the cautionary elements of the story. “Studies on hunter-gatherer folk tales suggest that these narratives encode really important information about the environment – stuff that’s relevant to survival,” he says. Yet in his analysis such elements were just as flexible as seemingly trivial details. What, then, is important enough to be reproduced from generation to generation?
The answer, it would appear, is horror: gory and gruesome aspects of the story turned out to be the best preserved of all. In many European versions, for example, the wolf feeds Red Riding Hood a meal made from the remains of her grandmother. “There’s this brilliant Italian one where the wolf says there’s some tortellini, but of course those are her grandmother’s ears,” says Tehrani. She is usually then given “wine” to drink, which is her grandmother’s blood. In East Asian variants, a group of sisters spend the night in bed with a tiger and awake to hear it crunching on the bones of the youngest sibling. “Those kinds of features are very common in lots of versions of the story,” says Tehrani.
Why are these details treated with such reverence by generations of storytellers, when other features are readily substituted? Tehrani has an idea: “In an oral context, a story won’t survive because of one great teller. It also needs to be interesting when it’s told by someone who’s not necessarily a great storyteller.” Maybe dining on the remains of a relative is so gripping that it helps the story remain riveting and popular, no matter how badly it’s told.
Jack Zipes at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, isn’t convinced. He says horror is not enough to keep fairy tales alive. “Even if they’re gruesome, they won’t stick unless they matter,” he says. He believes the perennial theme of violence against women in stories like Little Red Riding Hood explains why they continue to feel relevant. But Tehrani points out that although Western versions include violence against women, others don’t. In Chinese and Japanese versions, often known as The Tiger Grandmother, the villain is a woman, whereas in both Iran and Nigeria, the victim is a boy.
Resistance is not futile
Mathias Clasen at Aarhus University in Denmark isn’t surprised by Tehrani’s findings. “Horror-inspiring stories go straight to the bedrock of human nature,” he says. “Norms and morals change, but the things that scare us, the fact we are easily scared, and that we seek out entertainment that’s designed to scare us – those are constant.”
Jonathan Gottschall of Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania agrees. “Most of us think of ourselves as gentle, civilised, peace-loving people, yet we spend huge parts of our lives inside story worlds that are incredibly gruesome and violent,” he says. Clasen, who has built a career trying to understand our fascination for horror, believes that scary stories teach us what it feels like to be afraid without having to experience real jeopardy. “I think [horror] builds up resistance to negative emotions,” he says.
Ironically, when men like Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers began committing fairy tales to print in the 18th and 19th centuries, they excised much of the violence and unpleasantness. Many darker stories couldn’t be adapted to this more moralistic and patriarchal medium and have been lost. Sadly, we will never know just how compelling these gruesome tales were.
(Image: D. Corson/ClassicStock/Corbis, GraphicaArtis/Corbis, Beau Lark/Fancy Images/Plainpicture)
This article appeared in print under the headline “Scary tales”
