In January 2022, I took a week off between exams and term 2 and I reread the percy jackson series. During this time I came across the myth of king midas having donkey ears. In summary: Midas is cursed by Apollo to have the ears of an ass. Naturally, Midas wants to keep this from his citizenry so he hides his ears under his long hair and crown; the only person in the know is his barber, who is sworn to secrecy. The barber, wanting to get the secret off of his chest, decides to whisper the secret to a shrub. This shrub then grows into a tree which is cut down and made into a lyre which is played in the king’s court. When the instrument is played, everyone in the court hears the lyre repeat what the barber had told it: “The king has donkeys ears!”.
As myths go this isn’t particularly cool or interesting, but it piqued my interest for the following reason: I had absolutely read the myth as a child, only it wasn’t about king midas but rather high king of Ireland Labhraidh Loingseach. The whole story is more or less identical, only with a harp and with horse’s ears. (Also Labhraidh has all his barber’s killed bar this one, so the moral appears to be: kill everyone with dirt on you.)
This baffled me, that a story so anodyne would transcend cultures up through europe and across two seas. Looking into it further however, you’d find that the Korean’s have a myth of a king Gyeongmun who grew donkey’s ears and his barber whispered it to a bamboo tree which, when wind blew across it, would sing “Our king’s ears are like donkey ears.” This, to me, was absolutely ridiculous. There’s no good reason for this story to survive across an entire continent. At the time I just accepted this ridiculous fact and moved on.
Yesterday, however, my girlfriend found this blog post entitled: Midas, and other folktales of type 782 about humans with animal ears or horns. As it happens, there is apparently so many folklore tales that extend across the world in different forms, that they have been taxonimised in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index: an academic SCP foundation for fairy tales. All fairy tales belong somewhere in the index, each entry extending ridiculously far. For a particularly grim example, consider The Language of Animals, folktales of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 670 about wife beating, a folklore tale extending from denmark to india to jamaica about men who are embarrassed that they can talk to animals and so they perform domestic abuse (yes, seriously).
I don’t know what to say about all this but I have to put it down somewhere. I guess humans are just really into stories and so any given story is likely to go international. I have no idea.