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Where Tales Began

Where stories come from, and where they went.

Trail term

First-Ink Date: The Earliest Record, Not the Origin

Updated

Definition

A first-ink date is a term used on Where Tales Began for the date of the earliest written record of a story or custom that can be checked. It marks where the paper evidence starts. It is not the date the story was first told or the custom first practiced, and it makes no claim about how much older either one might be.

The Cinderella story of Ye Xian shows the difference. Its first-ink date falls before 863, the year Duan Chengshi died: he wrote it down in the Youyang Zazu more than eight centuries before Charles Perrault published "Cendrillon" in 1697. That date says when the story reached paper in a form that survives. It does not say that the story began in that century, or in China.

A date with a scope

A first-ink date always belongs to a stated scope: a tale type, a custom, a name or a kind of record. Change the scope and the date can change. An older story about Rhodopis, recorded by Strabo, is often brought into Cinderella comparisons, but it lacks the heroine mistreated by a stepmother and stepsisters. Whether the earliest Cinderella is Ye Xian or something older depends on how the tale type is defined, so an entry gives its definition before it gives a first-ink date. In the same way, the phrase used is "the earliest surviving record", and never "the origin".

How the site uses it

On Where Tales Began, the first-ink date is the anchor for every claim about the beginnings of a story or custom. A statement about a beginning is tied to a first-ink date and to the source that carries it, or it is not made. Each entry shows its first-ink date in the Earliest ink panel near its end, with the name of the document, its date and a link to the source.

A first-ink date can move. A newly found text, a manuscript dated afresh or a revised study can move it earlier or later. For that reason the panel carries a line of the form Sources checked through YYYY-MM-DD, and the entries that rest most on earliest records are re-checked on a schedule set out in Following the Paper Trail.

The first-ink date is the date that every version in a motif drift table carries. When the records studied for a living custom do not reach far enough to settle how it began, the custom is described as an orphan rite.