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Unit 7 Storytelling
Expansion 7
Exercise 1
Many of the fairy tales that children still
enjoy today are very old.
In fact ,they are so old that nobody knows
who first told them.
For centuries,
these stories were passed down orally and,
as very few people knew how to read or write,
nobody wrote them down.
It wasn't until the 17th century that
writers like the Italian Giambattista Basile
and the French Charles Perrault published
collections of fairy tales.
People enjoyed these tales,
especially those of Perrault,
which were more famous.
However,nobody studied this type of story
in a serious way.
Then,in the early 19th century,
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm published their
collections of fairy tales.
The two brothers studied fairy tales carefully.
They noticed that many German fairy tales
were very similar to fairy tales
from other European countries.
People began to study fairy tales
and try to explain the similarities
between stories from different countries.
At that time, people still did not know
about the large number of stories
that existed in Africa, in the Americas,
in Asia, and in other parts of the world.
In recent times,
it has been possible to compare fairy stories
from all around the world
Although some countries are very different
from each other,like Egypt and Iceland,
their fairy tales are very similar.
Both Egypt and Iceland have Cinderella stories,
for example.
There are also very similar stories in China,
in England, in Korea, in Siberia, in France,
and in many other countries.
Experts now believe that there may be about
a thousand versions of the Cinderella story.
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