Что отражают зеркала? Кто живёт по ту сторону зеркальной поверхности? Зачем закрывают зеркала, когда в доме умирает человек? Почему в Европе в средние века не ставили зеркала в спальне?
Перевод на английский
How does the same story come to be known as “Beauty and the Beast” in the U.S. and “The Fairy Serpent” in China?
As Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm collected Germanic folktales in the 19th century, they realized that many were similar to stories told in distant parts of the world. The brothers Grimm wondered whether plot similarities indicated a shared ancestry thousands of years old.
Folktales are passed down orally, obscuring their age and origin. “There’s no fossil record [of them] before the invention of writing,” says Jamie Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University.
To test the Grimms’ theory, Tehrani and literary scholar Sara Graça da Silva traced 76 basic plots back to their oldest linguistic ancestor using an international folktale database. If a similar tale was told in German and Hindi, the researchers concluded its roots lay in the languages’ last common ancestor. “The Smith and the Devil,” a story about a man who trades his soul for blacksmith skills, was first told some 6,000 years ago in Proto-Indo-European. Now we tell a similar tale about the blues guitarist Robert Johnson.
Speaking from his home in Southampton, England, Bradshaw explains why most scientists didn’t consider the bond between humans and their pets an important area of research; why women of the Awa-Gauja tribe in the Amazon breastfeed monkeys; and why having an animal in the house is so important, especially for kids whose world has increasingly been reduced to a smartphone screen. [Discover why your dog eats poop.]
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