To appear in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 1 2 3 Oral Fairy Tale or Literary Fake ? Investigating the Origins 4 of Little Red Riding Hood Using Phylogenetic Network

22 23 The evolution of fairy tales often involves complex interactions between oral and 24 literary traditions, which can be difficult to tease apart when investigating their 25 origins. Here, we show how computer-assisted stemmatology can be productively 26 applied to this problem, focusing on a long-standing controversy in fairy tale 27 scholarship: did Little Red Riding Hood originate as an oral tale that was adapted by 28 Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, or is the oral tradition in fact derived from literary 29 texts? We address this question by analysing a sample of 24 literal and oral versions 30 of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood using several methods of phylogenetic 31 analysis, including maximum parsimony and two network-based approaches 32 (NeighbourNet and TRex). While the results of these analyses are more compatible 33 with the oral origins hypothesis than the alternative literary origins hypothesis, their 34 interpretation is problematised by the fact that none of them explicitly model lineal 35 (i.e. ancestor-descendent) relationships among taxa. We therefore present a new 36 likelihood-based method, PhyloDAG, which was specifically developed to model 37 lineal as well as collateral and reticulate relationships. A comparison of different 38 structures derived from PhyloDAG provided a much clearer result than the 39 maximum parsimony, NeighbourNet or TRex analyses, and strongly favoured the 40 hypothesis that literary versions of Little Red Riding Hood were originally based on 41 oral folktales, rather than vice versa. 42 43