Little Nightingale the Crier
an Arabic tale
Once upon a time there were three girls. They were spinners and had nothing but their spinning. Every day they used to spin and go down to the market to sell their product and buy food. One day the town crier announced that it was forbidden to put on a light in the city, because the king wanted to test his subjects—to see who was obedient and who was not.[1] That night the king and his vizier went through the city to check whose lights were on and whose were not.
In this Arabic fairytale set in a faraway kingdom, when the king passes by, he hears of the cries of these three girls, who want so badly to have light, but they refuse to disobey him. They beg him for light, and in order to fulfill their wishes, he takes pity upon these subjects and marries them to three men––the cook, the baker, and his own son, the prince. The sisters married to the cook and the baker grow jealous, and when the girl married to the prince gave birth, they secretly swapped out three babies in a row with a puppy, a cat, and a box. They cast the actual babies into a box in the river, washing away into a distant orchard, to be discovered by an elderly couple. The rest of the story explores a long trajectory of supernatural tales.
This story is classified as type ATU 707, or “the Three Golden Children,” a genre of folktales where the magical children are taken from a woman due to a jealous external factor. This categorization rises from the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, or ATU Index, which lists out all the archetypal tale structures utilized in folklore studies. In 2016, folklorist Sara Graça da Silva and anthropologist Jamshid J. Tehrani attempted to create a phylogenetic model of magical tales from the Proto-Indo-European stratum of magic tales. Some types include:
ATU 328 –– the Boy Steals the Ogre’s Treasure
ATU 554 –– the Grateful Animals
ATU 311 –– Rescue by Sister
ATU 332 –– Godfather Death
ATU 425C –– Beauty and the Beast
ATU 505 –– the Grateful Dead
ATU 675 –– the Lazy Boy
ATU 592 –– the Dance Among Thorns
This structuring draws immediate parallels with phylogenetic trees for genuses, species, and families. The categorization of stories is like giving taxidermied names. Similar to species, stories influence each other in cascading effects, so that one story might beget another, but the stories at the endpoints of the lineage of influence are no longer similar to one another. Within ecological species, we can define species by the biological species concept––which considers animals to be reproductive units––or the evolutionary species concept––which evaluates species not from the contemporary reproductive capacity, but from a historical evolutionary perspective. How should we consider the lineage of tales, if we were to think about which ones came first, and which ones spawned the others?
Like biology, words reproduce themselves, evolve, and subvert. When the biochemistry of words is successful with a given audience––its environment––and it occupies a given niche––by reaching the right target audience at the right time, the words survive on. The structure survives on; the characters survive on. Fairy tales already have their own phylogeny. But as the scientific world progresses, I wonder if there will be a more specific phylogeny of scientific tales, too.