Gone Medieval - The Medieval Origins of Fairy Tales

Episode Date: July 2, 2022

When we think of fairy tales, we think of imprisoned maidens, turreted towers, magic spinning wheels, wicked witches and demonic dwarves and dragons. Much of the iconography of these stories, particularly those from Europe, dates back to Medieval times. Some of them, such as the story of Hansel and Gretel, are even rooted in specific events.In today’s edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis meets author Nicholas Jubber whose book The Fairy Tellers reveals the surprising origins and people behind the world’s most influential magical tales.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was produced by Rob Weinberg and edited by Thomas Ntinas.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. The stories we tell our children often endure because they speak to something at the very core of being human. They're timeless, they're instructive, they're designed to highlight what is often right and wrong with the world. And frequently, they're actually pretty terrifying if you listen to them too closely. So when and where does some of our most famous fairy tales come from? Well, fortunately, Nick Jubber is here to tell us a bit more. Nick's latest book, The Fairy Tellers, takes us on a journey into the secret history of fairy tales. And I'm delighted that Nick is joining us to share some of these fascinating stories and histories with us.

Thanks for joining us, Nick. Oh, thank you very much, Matt. So I'm always telling anyone who listen to this podcast that pretty much everything is medieval. Can I claim fairy tales as medieval too? In many ways you can, yes, because especially when we look at European fairy tales, so much of the iconography of our fairy tales goes back into medieval times, all those details, those jagged towers and turrets, the maiden in the tower,

the architecture is very much medieval, the spinning wheels, and also many of the creatures, you know, the dragons, which obviously goes back into the medieval obsession in Europe with dragons, and the dwarves and giants, you know, if you look into medieval epics

like the Nibbolungan lead, for example, the German epic, you have a lot of the features that you would then find in a very different form in fairy tales. And they also, some of them, speak to specific events in medieval history. So, for example, the story of Hansel and Gretel, some scholars have traced that back to the great famine of the 14th century in Germany.

And also when you look at the witches and the persecution of witches, that goes right through into the 19th century, but certainly could be rooted in that medieval culture. And do you think that owes a lot to the times when these tales are being written down? I guess there's probably an element of them that have been oral histories for a long time. But do we see them starting to be set down in writing during the Middle Ages? Well, it was a lot longer before they were set down. I mean, that's one of the differences between, say, fairy tales and folk tales on the one hand, and epics on the other, which are the recitations

of bards of the court. And so had that earlier literary culture, whereas fairy tales stayed very much in the mouths of the ordinary people, which is one of the things that makes them so interesting. And so it's why when people started to be collecting those stories much later in the 18th and 19th century, people like the Brothers Grim famously and many other folklorists. They went to the ordinary people, in some cases they didn't. Through various processes of transmission, these stories were brought to them. And they were seen to be representing that much older culture that had been passed down through the generations and down through the centuries.

And do we have evidence of some of these tales travelling around as well? So do they move between Europe and Asia and the Middle East or in the medieval period following things like the Silk Roads, maybe? Absolutely, and there's a lovely quote that Wilhelm Grimm wrote in 1811 when he said, We may dare to follow the threads spun by old fables and borne through the world in marvellous shapes and circuits. It's this idea that stories move around, they travel, and often, as you mentioned, they travelled along routes like the Silk Road. So you can find stories, for example, one of the earliest collections that I've written about in my book is the ocean of the streams of story. The Catharsar at Sagara from Kashmir in the 11th century.

And there are stories there that we can find the structures of those stories repeating themselves across into the Middle East and then coming into Europe. So, for example, there's a story about a young woman called Upa Kosa. It's a folk tale about this woman who's harassed by various sex pests while her husband's away and she manages to lure them into a cabinet and lock them up and then humiliate them all. And that story is repeated in the tale of the lady in the five suitors in the 1,0001 nights in the Middle East. And then we find that story repeated in the DeCameran. I think it's the eighth day of the DeCamaran.

and then in Chaucer's Franklin's tale from the Canterbury Tales and then all the way through to Northern Europe where there's a version of it in Master Made, a Norse tale and even in Iceland. But as the tales move, of course, they change and they develop and they take on different aspects of the various different cultures and landscapes that they move around, and they're evolving all the time. So it's a bit like a Chinese whisper as it goes further and further away. You can feel that story changing into something different.

And I suppose one of the advantages of these stories that are based in something quite primeval and at the core of humanity is that they can be changed to make them fit your view of the world. So as they travel along these routes, they can morph over distance and over time to fit the preoccupations and the worldviews of the communities that they encounter

and they can be kind of adjusted to fit all of those different places, which gives us lots of different versions, I guess, of the same stories. Absolutely. It's one of the things that I find so fascinating about them is that many fairy tales have this very universal quality about them. They often speak to themes that mean something to people all around the world. But they also take on these textures and details and certain attitudes and values that are specific to the places that they come from. So, I mean, a famous example is Cinderella,

where the oldest full version that we know of the story, there are fragments from earlier, but really when you're looking at the full story that we understand as the fairy tale of Cinderella, we go back to 9th century China to a tale written down by a story. Chinese bureaucat called Duan Chengxi in his miscellaneous morsels from Yu Yang. And in that story, the character is called Yexian, and she lives with her stepmother and step-sister after her parents have died,

and she has to do all the skivying and do all the housework. And then she befriends a fish in the river, and that fish is killed by her stepmother. And but then she buries the bones of the fish after she's advised by the spirit of her grandfather. And those bones then become a sort of version of what we think of as the fairy godmother, so that when her step-sister gets to go to the ball, she's given a dress and some golden slippers by the bones of the fish, and then she goes to the ball, but she leaves her slipper behind because she's in such a rush to get home

before her step-family find that she's gone. And then the slipper eventually falls into the hands of a warlord who she then meets when she goes to try and retrieve the slipper, and then he falls in love with her, and she doesn't object. And so he marries her and her stepsister and stepmother are left in the cave where they've lived and quarreling with each other, because they haven't got anybody to do the chores for them now

until the cave slides over and crushes them to death. So, you know, a lovely grisly ending. And that is the core, really, of the skeleton of that story that we would recognise as Cinderella. But it's in the 17th century in Italy that it becomes probably more familiar as the story that we know when it was told by an Italian writer Jean-Bartista Bazile

and he called the character Sena Rantola, which then translates into Cinderella and has the sort of the search for the slipper. And in the Italian version, you have, it's very Neapolitan, You know, there's a lot of very shouty characters in it. The heroine, she kills her stepmother by snapping her neck under the lid of a trunk when she's trying to look for rags for her to dress in,

and they have ravioli and ricotta-filled pastries at the feast. So it takes on these sort of textures of a whole new landscape. And then when you get a little bit later into the French version that was set down by Charles Perro, which is where we get the idea of the glass slipper from, and everything becomes a little bit more refined and precious and elegant in that sort of 18th century French style, and then through to the 19th century version by the Grims and so forth. with each version, you can see the story changing, adapting itself, which is what stories do,

which is why they are like viruses, it's like the roots of the bubonic plague and like trade. You know, they moved around often with merchants and with people who were moving along those paths around the world. And then you find the stories that survive and endure, the ones that are able to root themselves into that new landscape and grow something from the new vegetation around them and to develop and evolve so that they can speak to the people in that new climate and then move along to the next place along. Fascinating. So we've kind of traced the medieval origins of Cinderella there. If I throw a couple of others at you, can you give us a brief history of where those ones may have come from? So let's start with Sleeping Beauty, for example. What do we know about the origins of the Sleeping Beauty story? So Sleeping Beauty is another story that we find in this very seminal collection, the tale of tales by Jim, Modista Basilica from the 17th century. But actually, there's an earlier version of the story in the 14th century in a book known as Perse Forest, which is sort of epic with various elements of the Arthurian.

mythology in it. But the core of this particular story we find as the story of a young woman who is cursed to fall into an eternal sleep when she touches a piece of flax. And then she's eventually visited after being in sleep for many years by a knight who comes along and is so overwhelmed by her beauty that we're told in the story that he followed the tenets of Venus. And so it's a bit sordid that he isn't able to wake her, but she does end up pregnant and gives birth to a little boy who then sucks the flax out of her when he's trying to feed from her. And that's how she's eventually, sort of roused from her eternal sleep. And that story was then retold in Bazile's Tale of Tales and then led to many, many different variations.

And of course, there are other themes from that story that we find in other earlier tales. That's one of the exciting things with fairy tales that you can always find fragments here and there sort of scattered around. But when you're looking at the sort of full core of that story, I think there does seem to be a relationship there between the Perse Forrest version and Gian Battista Bazzile's Tale of Tales. And how about maybe Rapunzel? So I guess the latest iteration of that that we had is Disney's tangled. So where does that start? How far back can we trace the story of Rapunzel? Well, I think this is a really exciting one

because it goes back to the 11th century in Persia. And there's a collection of stories, an epic called The Shahn Army, the Book of Kings. And it is a book actually that really obsessed me for several years, a few years back. And I traveled in the slipstream of this book, but in Iran and Central Asia and Afghanistan. And I remember actually being in a tea house in Mashhad in the east of Iran. and seeing this picture on the wall, which showed a beautiful young woman on the top of a tower with her long hair and two braids falling down

to the foot of the tower and the knight standing at the bottom. And I said people around me, that looks like the story of Rapunzel. And they were, no, no, that's not Rapunzel. It's the story of Wudaba and Zal, which is this wonderful romance from the Book of Kings. And the story is, firstly, the Prince Zal. He has his own sort of wonderful fairy tale backstory because he is born with white hair,

and his father is very ashamed of this, and so throws him out into the forest to Mount Albor. and he's raised by a talking bird called the Seymourg, which reappears in a lot of medieval Islamic and Middle Eastern literature. And eventually he grows up into a doughty, fine young knight, and his father takes him back. It becomes one of the knights of the parlavans. And so word of him reaches the princess Rudaba in Kabul,

and then word of her beauty reaches him. And so they decide they want to meet each other, and he comes to her tower, and she's at the top of her tower, and he's at the bottom, and he says, how can I reach you? And she says, well, why don't you climb up my hair? and so she throws down the two tresses of her incredibly long hair for him to climb up.

But this is where the story is a little bit different because Zal says, I'm not going to hurt your hair. That would be an incredibly ungentlemanly thing to do. I'm going to find my own way back up the tower. So he uses his ropes and his climbing agility and eventually makes his way to the top and then they embrace and drink wine together and pledge eternal love to each other

and eventually are married and she gives birth to Rostan, the greatest hero in Persian literature. So it's a story of wonderful romance. It doesn't include a lot of what then became the latest European version of that fairy tale. But that core image, and I think a lot of fairy tales are sort of really defined by a particular core image, that image of the girl with the maiden in the tower with the hair hanging down and the prince coming up to meet her. That's very much there in that story.

And then again, it's Bazile who gives us the earliest European version, I think, of that story, where he tells it as the story of a young woman called Petra Sinella, who has to live with an ogressant in her tower until the prince comes to rescue her. It seems that we do quite often have this very central image that doesn't change through the stories. And then it's sort of everything else is bolted on around that and built before and after that central moment, that central image to perhaps reflect different societies and things like that. But there's always that core image at the middle of it. Absolutely. Because I think some of these images are just so striking, so strong. And you could imagine that they would be very easily transferred by merchants and traders and people travelling around.

And so those images can be particularly viral, as we see, you know, with the way that imagery transports itself in social media today. I suppose if you maybe pick up a story from somewhere where you've gone to trade, and there's a story of this beautiful woman in a tower who lowers down her long hair that can be climbed up, even if that's all you've got, you can build the rest of the story around those central images eventually. Is there a good example of how these stories flowed and moved around some of these trade routes, and with the movements of people. I think one of the things you mentioned in the book is the Ocean of the Streams of Story,

which is interesting. Yeah, the Ocean of the Streams of Story is an absolutely fascinating and neglected collection from the 11th century. And it was told by a Brahmin and courtier poet called Somadeva. And the whole backstory of it,

I think, is really fascinating because the story is that he told these stories to soothe his queen, Suyavati, during a time of great trouble. And she was a very strong queen, married to the King of Kashmir, and she had advised him to abdicate his story, throne to his son, to her son, Kalasha, because she wanted to make sure that it was her son

and not the son of one of the other royal wives who became the king. But unfortunately, Kalashir turned out to be a bit of a disaster. He was a very sexually predatory in the Chronicles. There's a book called The River of Kings, which gives us a lot of information about the court of that time in Kashmir. And we're told that he used to visit the wives of all his ministers and cause all sorts of trouble. But he was also very violent. He had his father's retinue, destroyed, burned. He spread poison amongst them. And there's a description of him standing on the top of his palace, dancing with joyous his father's retinue is all burning to death, which sort of reminds us of Nero. So it was a time of great trouble. And during all this,

King Ananta, who'd abdicated, would blame his wife, so you've varted because he said, well, she was the one who told him to abdicate. So it was a very difficult time for them all. And so the story is that she needed these stories, as people often do. Stories are such a wonderful way of soothing people in times of trouble. And so Somer David came along, and she was very lucky because he really had a lot of stories. I mean, he had more than 350 of them, which went into this collection, the ocean of the streams of story. And there's stories that are told by everybody. They start off with the God Shiva telling stories to his consort, Pavarty, but then you go down to stories told by kings and queens, by generals, by ministers, all the way right down through the social hierarchy, until you have stories told by a merchant explaining how he managed to make a massive fortune out of a dead mouse or a bedstead cellar or a demon in a fiery pit. There's a whole collection of, I think, something like 24 different stories that are told by a zombie,

basically a vetow, which is a sort of corpse-occupying zombie that grabs hold of the back of a king and tells him these stories, and then he has to answer a riddle at the end of each story, otherwise his head will explode into a thousand pieces. So there are all kinds of magical stories, and we can recognize a lot of elements in them. So, for example, there's a story of a man who jumps out of a shipwreck and then dives into an underwater city, and there is a beautiful woman there presiding over the city who decides that he's just a story. the man for her and that she's going to marry him. Or there's the story of a wonderful story called the city of Wooden Automatant, which is about a king who finds his way to this city where all the

people are made out of wood and the animals as well. Men and women, merchants, courtiers, everybody seems to be made out of wood except for one person who's presiding over the city, and he's a carpenter called Rajadara, and he explains that he had to escape from his hometown when his brother, who was infatuated with a woman who demanded a lot of jewels, raided the local treasury by creating his own sort of robot thieves, out of swans with special strings attached. But then the strings got cut by the guards, and then the king realised he knew exactly

who could have made these sort of robot thieves. And so they were chased out of town. They parted ways. And then Rajiyadhara, the carpenter, comes to this abandoned town and has made himself all these people so that he can have company, and then eventually is able to leave this place

with the king who's come to visit. And that story has echoes of the city of brass, which was told in the 1,001 nights, but also of many sort of later stories about automaton's and what we think of now as robots. Or there's a story called the Golden City, which is about a gambler called Sacta Dava, who says that he's seen a magical city, and he goes to the court where a princess is sort of setting this riddle who can tell her where this magical city is. And he says, oh, I know.

And then she says, you don't at all. You've never been there. And she hasn't thrown out into the forest. But then he decides he's going to prove her wrong, and he's going to find the city. And it goes through all sorts of adventures, shipwrecks. He gets sucked into a whirlpool and has to hang. to the canopy of a marine banyan tree, and then he flies on the back of a talking crow, and he gets finally to this magical city

where it's inhabited by a mysterious woman who disappears, and then he finds himself back in his hometown again after getting kicked into a lake by a horse, and then he has to go on the adventure all over again. But this story, it reappears in the 1,000 of 1 nights as a story that we know as the Golden City, which was told by a Syrian storyteller called Hannah Diab to Antoine Golan in the 18th century.

And then amazingly, there's a version of the story that is retold by Hans Christian Anderson in the 19th century. And with each version, you can see the structure of the story, this idea of the princess with the riddle about this magical place and the hero who has to somehow work out where this magical place is. You see this structure repeated throughout all these versions of the story. But in each one, they take on aspects of the local culture. So the Kashmiri version has a lot of Hindu iconography in it.

The Vidyodaras, who are a form of minor deities, Hindu culture. For example, the Garuda, the Talking Bird is known as a Garuda, part of the Hindu mythology. And then in the Arabian version, you have the rook, which is the same magnificent bird that carries Sinbad on some of his adventures. And that appears as the creature that takes him to this magical city, whereas in Hans Christian Anderson's version, the hero has a pair of swan wings that he's cut off a swan whilst it was giving its death song and that magically transport him to the place which becomes a cave run by trolls. And so it takes on sort of very Nordic qualities in that version of the story. So in every version, you see. You see, you see,

the structure of the story, evolving, changing all the time, but retaining certain consistencies, whilst the paraphernalia, the furnishings of the story are switched around so that they can fit the new audience that's listening to the story. Millions dead, a higher proportion of civilian casualties than in the Second World War, America, Britain, Russia and China all involved in a conflict that technically remains active to this day. So why is the Korean War of 1950 to 50, called the Forgotten War. The North Koreans and the South Koreans, even today in the 2020s, they're still officially at war. This July, we're dedicating a special series of episodes to finding out what this unique

conflict was all about. From the halls of power? I've seen documents in the last week where the British Chiefs of Staff are telling Clement Attlee, this might lead to World War III. This might be a nuclear war. To the battlefront. During the Korean War, the ship fired its guns far more than that. ever did in the whole of the Second World War, because that's what we were doing, die in,

die out. Join me, James Rogers throughout July on the Warfare podcast from History Hit. As we remember the war, the world forgot. And what do you think was the point of the ocean of streams of story? Why does Samadiva write down or tell these stories to someone in this moment of unrest and civil war? I mean, do they often focus on the idea that you have to go through suffering to, achieve something? Is that maybe the point he's trying to get across? Why does he tell all of these

stories to a woman who is caught up in a civil war? It's a good question. And I think there are lots of meanings to the different stories and often those meanings are brought out and we're given sort of platitudes about what we can derive from the stories. But there's such a diversity of storytelling. There are so many different meanings to them and there are so many different stories. And so it's very varied. I think the core reason for telling these stories was for escapism. It's helping this woman to get away from the troubles that surround her. And it's the reason a lot of people binge on box sets today. You want to get away from all the problems of the ordinary world.

And so you escape into these wonderful flights of fantasy and these magnificent stories. So whilst many of them do have morals to them, I think that's really a later idea about storytelling. I think the Victorians were particularly keen on. But actually, when we go back earlier into those medieval collections, there is much of a stronger sense of these stories. They really are for entertainment, therefore enjoyment, and pleasure and for taking us away from the cares of the world.

I love that idea that we should see some of these collections of stories as the medieval equivalent of binging on a box set. It's a really nice parallel. I guess one of the most famous collections of these stories is possibly the 1,001 nights. Can you tell us what we know about that collection and how it developed and where that came from? Yeah, so these stories have been doing the rounds in the Middle East in any sort of public places and social spaces for centuries. but it was in the 18th century that they became a sort of global phenomenon

and that was when a French scholar called Antoine Galland who was a man who had grown up through the ranks from impoverished origins to become an important figure at the court and in scholarly circles and he sent out to some friends in Aleppo to send him this manuscript which came from the 15th century and which is one of the earliest sort of manuscripts with a large selection of the stories and he translated them and they really took off very straight away and they had a lot of the core stories the city of brass the fishermen in the gin Maruf the cobbler

and of course the frame story about Shahrazad having to tell these stories every night to survive. Otherwise, King Shahrio is going to have her executed. And so she leaves the story dangling, the cliphanger, so the king is desperate to hear the story the next night. And so all these wonderful stories, and he translated them into French, and they became very popular, and then they were translated almost instantly into English and into many other European languages. But actually, when it comes to some of the stories that have become the most famous stories,

they were told to him orally by a storyteller called Hannah Diab, who came to Paris in 1709 with an archaeologist called Paul Lucas. And he was brought to the court of Versailles, presented to the Sun King, giving him a pair of Desert Jeboas from Tunisia and dressing in his traditional Syrian garb. And he was introduced to Antoine Galand at Paul Lucas's apartment. And Galand had this great success with all these stories. And he asked, you know, have you got any more stories that you can tell me? And so Hannah Diab told him many stories, including the tale of Aladdin and the wonderful lamp

Ali Barber and the 40 Thieves, the enchanted horse, and several others, including the Golden City, the one I've just described earlier. So those then were translated and it became a new volume of the 2001 Knights and then they took off as well and then led to various theatrical versions and obviously the film versions that we're familiar with for more recent years. But those stories, especially those later ones, are stories that Hannah Diab would have picked up in the coffeehouse circle amongst the oral storytellers, the Hakkawattis. And it's something that I've seen myself in places like Damascus and Cairo where, where You'd have these, it's sort of dying culture, but I think it still survives to this day,

where you have these storytellers who would sit in the coffee house and people would be drinking their coffee and smoking their hubbly bubbly and listening to these stories. They'll spin them out and often leave them with a cliffhanger. So I've heard of storytellers who've been chased by their audience afterwards because they were desperate to find out how the story ended. And Hanna Diab had that skill of being able to spin out these tales and narrated them to Anton Galano. That led to some of those absolutely fantastic stories that we're still hearing new versions of today. And do you think some of these big movements sort of 18th, 19th century maybe, to write a lot of these fairy tales down? Do you think that stops their development or do they continue to metamorphosise? Do we see them being retold in films today under slightly different guises maybe?

Or did writing all of these things down in a single volume kind of break that continuous evolution that we'd seen for centuries through the medieval period? It's a great thing that they were written down because otherwise a lot of these stories would have been lost. but there is always that possibility that we are losing something as they are written down because I think fairy tales are a particularly oral form. They are really at their best when they're being told from the mouth in a public space, which is why I think storytelling, the experience of storytelling is something that seems to be flourishing and coming back in many ways today because I think people do love to hear stories told by a storyteller. And of course the storyteller can then change the story.

They can do whatever they want with it. They can mix elements around. they can add in details from the audience around them. Whereas once they get set down in print, they become very static. And so there is a shift between the fairy tale and then the children's literature that followed, where you lose that agility, that flexibility about them.

And I think you also lose that diversity of different cultures that many of these stories came from, which is one of the things that I think makes them so important. But I think they're also very important because they are the voice of the ordinary people. You know, they're not from the courts. They're the voice of the folk. You know, that's why the Grims were so interested in this idea

of the stories of the folk. There's a Russian storyteller called Ivar Kudjikov, who went around in the 19th century collecting stories from the villages of the Riazan region near Moscow. And this was during the time of the emancipation of the serfs. So there's a sense here that he's collecting a culture that is about to change radically,

because Russian society was changed very, very, very radically at that time. And that these are stories going back through the centuries right back to that medieval voice. And so these are people who didn't get a voice in any other way. They didn't get to write down their thoughts and feelings in the sources that have come down to us mostly for medieval times. So it's often through the fairy tales that we can hear the ordinary people of medieval times and those hopes and aspirations that they would have had. And did you come across many examples of stories that hadn't travelled so well,

that were quite isolated to a single geographical location and there was no kind of other parallels, or are most of these stories fairly universal? Yes, there are stories that you do find in quite an isolated form, often you can understand a reason for them. For example, there's a story from the Italian collection of Gian Battista Bazila called the old woman who was skinned, which goes through various stages, but it ends up with two old women who want to revert to the beauty of youth, and one of them gets transformed by some fairies, and the other one doesn't, and so she asks her sister, how did you manage to become so beautiful and young again? And the sister says, well, I was skinned,

and so the other one goes to the barber and asks him to skin her, and he does, and that's the end of her life. So it's a pretty grisly tale and so you can understand why perhaps it hasn't found its way into nurseries around the world. So there are stories like that that you find in quite isolated forms and they often tell you a lot about individual storytellers as possibly more than they do about the wider cultures that they come from. But it is, I think, really remarkable how much correspondence you find between stories. And even when you might often found as I was researching that I'd be looking at a story thinking that this was a fairly unique example from a particular culture, for example, the first time that I read the story of the Golden City from the Indian

collection. And then I gradually find, oh, no, actually, there's this correspondence here with this story from the 1,000 one nights, and then there's a correspondence with other stories. And it's something that I tried to show in the book to sort of chart some of these connections between all these stories, because I think it is so exciting when you find just how much in common they have. And I guess it also goes to that idea, which I don't fully agree with the idea, you know, that there's a certain limited number of stories in the world. But I think that it's a certain limited number of stories in the world. But I think that does speak to an idea that there is connection between stories. And so even when you think something is a fairly isolated story, you actually often find

that in fact, when you go deeper into it, you realise that, oh, yes, it does connect with something from another part of the world or another time or place. Do you think that all of these stories speak to something deep inside all of us? That's why they all have a similar core and that's why they persist. But also do you think this demonstrates how interconnected the medieval world was? We tend to think about trade routes, certainly. But clearly, stories as well as other things, were travelling along all of those trade routes. Is this a good example of how connected the medieval world was? I'm struck by quite a lot of those stories that you've explained,

seem to be slowly migrating their way from east to west. We tend to think of them as very European fairy tales now, but they seem to be moving from east to west through the medieval period. Does it show us how connected the world really was? Yes. Well, for one thing, I think it shows just how much. of a cultural debt we have to the East and how much storytelling has moved across. And it is usually in that direction. And at the same time, I think it also does show us the interconnectedness across

cultures. And so often when we think of having these sort of huge barriers between cultures, when we look back into some of these core stories, and I think the same happens, actually, if we look back into some of these epic stories such as the Book of Kings or some of the Middle East and Indian epics, that you also find these tremendous correspondences, and these universal values that do join us, which is, I think, one of the reasons why there's such wonderful stories to read, because they do really illustrate in a very clear sense

that we're joined in our aspirations and our dreams. So with a lot of fairy tales, you have that sense of certain themes such as the rags to riches, which you get, obviously, in Cinderella or in stories like Aladdin and many others. And that's something that people can get anywhere. People are always dreaming of a better life, an easier life, a more luxurious life.

That's something that obviously travels very easily. There's also many fairy tales have a theme about family abandonment, the fear of being left behind. Obviously, Hansel and Gretel is a very famous example of this, the idea that you'll be left behind by your family and you'll have to somehow go your own way and survive against all the terrible menaces that might come against you, such as a witch in a house of bread and cakes or a gingerbread house,

or that you might have to survive against the wolves that menace the forest and so on. Those, I think, speak to children's fears all around the world, that fear, you know, that you'll be left behind. So that's something that can be understood all over the place. Stories to make children grateful for their parents. Absolutely, yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us to talk us through some of these fascinating stories, Nick. It's quite enlightening how some of these stories have existed for so long and are so similar across various different cultures that we can kind of chart that journey of them.

So thank you so much for joining us. Oh, you're welcome. Thanks very much for having me on the show, man. It's an absolute pleasure. Nick's book, The Fairy Tellers, A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales, is available now in all good bookshops, and I thoroughly recommend it. A fantastic read. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode of Gone Medieval. And don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you do get a moment, please drop us a review or rate us wherever you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify now. It really does help to go. new listeners to the podcast. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, then please do subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just follow the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.