The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #166858   Message #4018026
Posted By: Anne Lister
08-Nov-19 - 05:55 PM
Thread Name: Folklore: Rumpelstiltskin, thousands of years old?
Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumpelstiltskin, thousands of years old?
Hi, Steve - yes, almost certainly. I suppose, going back to my original preoccupation - it's frustrating not to know what the circumstances were when the 12th century writers came across the "folk" stories they have preserved in written form. I would love to know who the source tellers were, and how they told their stories. It's thought that French, Occitan, Castilian and Catalan tellers told their stories in rhyming couplets, for example, but the stories are preserved in prose (and in Latin, sometimes poor Latin at that), so we can't even try to detect any linguistic clues or quirks.
Now, if only someone would come up with a decent method of time travel, I'd like to go and visit a number of people and ask a lot of questions!