Storytelling is like the city of London, or Terry Pratchett’s mythical city of Ankh-Mopork. The newest stories we have are built upon untold layers of other stories, piling one on top of each other into the distant past.

It was this realization that first made me interested in learning about the Bible. I was taking a class on the Romantic poets, and started to realize that all of them leaned heavily on the weight and beauty lent by earlier works. A poem would be pretty by itself, but start to become profound when you learned that one line referred to this medieval epic, and the other made allusion to some ancient myth.

For many of those romantics, the Bible was the ultimate source of inspiration. The richness of ancient storytelling gave a power to their poetry that they could not conjure on their own, and so they would sprinkle in Biblical verses, references to Biblical tales, and wording borrowed directly from the book itself. I started to learn the Bible in order to try to catch all of these references on my own–both in the works of the romantics, but also in literature in general and modern culture at large.

It turns out, I needed to cast a wider net. In a study published in 2016, but newly making the rounds this week, researchers Sara Graca da Silva and Jamshid J. Tehrani found that the origins of fairy tales go back much farther than originally assumed. Using research methods originally pioneered for biological studies, the team discovered that familiar fairytales in various forms could be traced back to ancient roots, rather than originating in medieval times as previously thought. Many of these tales, it is reasonable to think, could have co-existed with the stories from the Bible.

Would ancient people have recognized the divide we place between fairy tales and sacred stories, or was it all co-mingled? Can we find fairy tale themes in Biblical stories?Why were the stories in the Bible canonized and others with just as much history were not? I’m hoping to delve into those questions in future posts, as I read more about this extremely interesting idea, but if you know some of the answers please get in touch!