14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Connecting Fairy Tales with the Classics, December 3, 2003
This review is from: Fairytale in the Ancient World (Paperback)
Having had this book in my personal collection for a few years now, I cannot praise it highly enough. As any folklorist knows, similar story threads exist across cultures and time. Why does this happen? One influence may have been the classic mythology from the Greeks and Romans. Graham Anderson makes reasonable connections between classical literature and our more modern folklore in previously unexplored ways. His writing is concise with easy-to-follow descriptions and analysis. If you are interested in the history of story, folklore, or the classics, this book is an excellent and relatively quick read. I only wish I had owned this book in the days when I was studying the classics as an undergraduate. It would have made reading the classics even more interesting than it was then.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The book shows a substantial number of fairy tales were long in evidence in antiquity, January 2, 2012
Mostly citing examples from Ancient Greece and as far back as Sumer and Egypt, Graham Anderson does an excellent job of providing the similar stories told in ancient lands. He provides the etymology of the various character names eg Pyrrha (Red), Chioni (white). I would recommend this book to all readers interested in tracing the most popular tales back to before the Rennaisance. These include Cinderella, Snow White, Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin and others.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Were there ancient Cinderellas?, November 15, 2011
This review is from: Fairytale in the Ancient World (Paperback)
Did the familiar children's fairytales of today exist in the ancient world? Were there ancient Cinderellas, Twelve Dancing Princesses, Sleeping Beauties and Pusses in Boots?
The answer: Maybe.
In FAIRYTALE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, Graham Anderson gives a scholarly account of the parallels between ancient myth and fairy tale.
Let us take the tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. The King, their father, discovers one day that their slippers are worn to pieces, as if they have been dancing all night. He invites the young men of the kingdom to find out. The successful candidate will marry the eldest princess. But if they fail, the penalty is death.
The one who eventually succeeds follows the princesses through a trap door, and down down to a forest, where they pass through a grove of jeweled trees to a lake, where twelve boats are waiting. Each princess is rowed across the lake by a waiting prince, and they arrive at a castle where a ball is being held. There, they dance the night away, returning just before dawn.
The illustrations usually show pretty young people dressed either in the fashions of the fifteenth century - with those tall conical head-dresses and floating veils - or in the fashions of the eighteenth, with those enormous hair styles, and flouncy dresses.
In any event, the whole thing has a medieval European feel to it. So how could it possibly be connected to an ancient Empire of the Middle East?
The first clue is the jeweled trees, a feature of an ancient tale about Gilgamesh, that also occur between a dark tunnel and a lake of death.
The second clue is the lake that they are rowed across, which is very reminiscent of the River Styx, and it's shadowy boatmen Charon who rows the souls of the recent dead across it.
Then there is the Aeneid, where Aeneus has to pluck the Golden Bough to follow the aged Sibyl across the Styx. Once there, he finds lost women who are dead heroines.
The third clue is that the princesses have to descend downwards to get to their destination, which is reminiscent of the capture of Persephone by Pluto.
Lastly, those slippers. Were those princesses merely dancing courtly dances at a ball, or were they in the grip of some uncontrollable frenzy?
If this sort of thing fascinates you, then you should read this book. Graham Anderson is Professor of Classics at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Four stars.
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