The Long Lives of Fairy Tales
cell.com
cell.com
At the very least, in Russia there are many tales of Ivan outwitting the Devil, regardless of his profession. Maybe that's just a horizontal transfer and the story taking advantage of a previously unoccupied memetic niche...
The cell.com article says:
"Fourteen of the 76 tales, including Beauty and the Beast, were assigned a 50% or greater chance of having been present in the common ancestor of the entire western branch of the Indo-European languages. This group includes all of the Celtic, Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, and might have originated between around 6,800 years ago"
This makes no sense as Beauty and the Beast is known to be literary in origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_and_the_Beast
I have been following the work of Finnish folklorist and professor emerita Satu Apo, who has recently released a 400 page tome on the history of fairy tales. I have to get my hands on it as it apparently includes a section called "The rise or belly landing of phylogenetic fairy tale research?".
I can translate some bits from the press release: https://www.epressi.com/tiedotteet/tiede-ja-tutkimus/mista-s...
The oldest known variant of Cinderella is fantasy literature from 9th century China ("Ye Xian").
Sleeping Beauty comes from Perrault's Tales of Mother Goose (17th century).
Snow White ("Richilde") comes from Johann Musäus's Volksmärchen der Deutschen (18th century).
Sleeping Beauty and Snow White were compiled in those works, not originally created there. Hell, "Volksmärchen" means "folk fairy tales." The very name tells you that Musäus didn't claim them as original creations, he was writing down what people had been telling each other for centuries orally.
Perrault's Sleeping Beauty was actually a retelling of this literary fairy tale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun,_Moon,_and_Talia
> The stories in the Pentamerone were collected by Basile and published posthumously
It's clear, once again, that while he may have embellished them for publication, he was not creating them out of whole cloth, but collecting them from folk tales in his area.
Regarding Basile, see long argument starting from page 75 in this book: http://www.academia.edu/19594654/A_FAIRY_TALE_NEW_HISTORY_Ru...
Chapter 4:
The Two Inventors of Fairy Tale Tradition
Giambattista Basile (1634–1636) and Giovan Francesco Straparola (1551, 1553)
Quote:
"According to scholars such as Ruth Bottigheimer and Maria Tatar, some of the tales probably originated in written form during the medieval period with writers such as Straparola and Boccaccio, but were modified in the 17th century and again rewritten by the Grimms. Moreover, Tatar writes that the brothers' goal of preserving and shaping the tales as something uniquely German at a time of French occupation was a form of "intellectual resistance" and, in so doing, they established a methodology for collecting and preserving folklore that set the model followed later by writers throughout Europe during periods of occupation."
If you want a villain, consider Disney who tried (sometimes successfully in the US) to exert control of the use of fairytales by other parties after they'd made a film of one.
What Disney has done is sued over trademark claims on Snow White, Beauty and the Beast etc, trying to claim proprietary ownership of public domain stories, characters and ideas.
Theese suits were expensive and not always successful so they eventually decided to stop explicitly mining the past and start developing their own characters (e.g. mermaid etc).
You can't trademark a story or idea, but you can trademark a particular character design. You can make your own Cinderella interpretation as long as you don't copy the exact art and design made by someone else.