Start Here: About Where Tales Began

Where Tales Began is a reference site for readers who want to know where a story or a custom first shows up in writing. Each entry sets the recorded versions side by side, with the text, the date and the source for every one. Origin stories are often repeated online with no source attached; the tables here are built so that a claim can be checked instead of taken on trust.

The name points to tales, but the site has five sections, and two of them, Festivals & Rituals and Lost Books, reach beyond stories.

Five sections

• Comparative Myth. Myths, folktales and motifs from different cultures, compared source by source: who wrote each version down, when and where, without assuming that the versions share an origin.
• Tale Variants. Fairy tales and folktales followed version by version, with their tale-type numbers, the earliest dated texts in the original languages, and the points where the versions part ways.
• Festivals & Rituals. Holidays and rites: their structure, the earliest written records of each custom, and how practice varies from place to place.
• Star Lore. The constellations: the myths attached to them, how they came by their names, and what the naked eye can see of them.
• Lost Books. Works that no longer survive, libraries that were lost, and the unique copies and manuscripts that carried texts forward: what is missing, when it was last copied or quoted, and what evidence shows that it existed.

A fairy-tale site? Only in part

Fairy tales make up one section out of five. Where Tales Began does not retell stories for bedtime or adapt them for children. It traces records: which text contains a version, in which edition and year, and how that version compares with the others on record. A Cinderella entry here is built around a table of dated texts from several languages, not around a retelling.

The readers in mind are people who look up the history of a custom before a holiday, beginning stargazers who want the myth and the naming history behind a constellation, students and teachers who need a table they can cite, and readers of myth and folklore who want to see the source behind a claim. Entries open with a Fast facts card for a quick answer, continue with the full comparison, and point onward in Where the trail goes next, with two or three places to look after this one.

What the site does not do

• It has nothing on astrology, horoscopes, tarot or spiritual services. Constellations appear here as astronomy and as myth.
• It offers no religious guidance and passes no verdict on any faith. Living traditions are described through their structure and their written record.
• It is not research of the kind that goes through academic peer review. Entries cite published scholarship and point readers to it; they do not present new research of their own.

The question behind every entry

Whether a story is true is not the question Where Tales Began sets out to answer. The questions are who recorded it, how it was rewritten, and where it left a record. The site gives priority to what stories were used for, and it does not start from a theory of why they spread. This is a choice about what to ask, and it shapes the topics and the angle of each entry; it is not a claim about how stories behave.

Several positions follow from that choice:

• Folktales have no single correct version. Asking for "the original" usually asks the wrong question. What can be traced is the earliest written record, and the two are not the same thing.
• Whether an older telling was "darker" is not the starting point. Entries quote each version and set them next to each other, so the differences are there to be seen.
• Constellation boundaries are modern lines drawn for astronomy, not an inheritance from myth. The current boundaries were drawn up by Eugène Delporte, approved at the 1928 general assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Leiden, and published in 1930. Presenting them as a legacy of antiquity is a mistake that entries correct openly.
• A claim that a custom descends in one line from a pagan past starts out under doubt. Entries separate the layers of the record by date, give the earliest record for each layer, and let the evidence decide each case.
• For a lost book, the first question is the copying chain: when and where the work was last copied or quoted. The reason any one book disappeared is argued from its own evidence, not assumed from a single dramatic event.

The aim is a reference in which every date can be followed back to the page it came from, and in which practices that are still alive are described without being ranked or judged.

How the records are checked

Versions and dates are checked one by one against public-domain editions of the original texts and against published scholarship in folklore and the classics. Every date and every version is given with its source, edition and year. Each entry names the earliest written record of its subject in an Earliest ink panel (the document, its date and a link to the source) in place of the vague label "ancient".

Star charts are drawn by program from published coordinates, and the dates of movable feasts are recalculated from their rules, so anyone with the same data can reproduce both. The full method, including how the word "earliest" is limited and how translations are chosen, is set out in Following the Paper Trail.

Reporting an error

Errors can be reported to contact@wheretalesbegan.com. A correction is listed at the foot of the entry it changes, in the form "Correction (date): what changed", and every correction on the site is collected on Fixes to the Record. Correction lines are never deleted. When a correction changes an entry's conclusion, a one-line notice also appears at the top of that entry.

Reusing and citing

Charts, tables and CSV files made by Where Tales Began are released under CC BY 4.0, each with a credit line ready to copy. The site's illustrations are not part of that release. Every entry carries a Cite this page block that gives the title, the publication date, the date of the last substantive revision and the canonical URL. The terms for each kind of material are on Reusing Charts and Images.

Three terms used here

• A first-ink date is the date of the earliest written record that can be checked: it marks where the paper evidence starts, not where a story or custom began.
• Motif drift is a difference between recorded versions of one tale type at the same point in the story, such as a golden shoe in one version and a glass slipper in another, described without claiming that one became the other.
• An orphan rite is a practice that is still carried on although, within the records studied, its early origin cannot be fixed.