How old is the idea of time travel?

November 20, 2006 9:08 AM

Wikipedia posits the mid- to late-1800s as the time when we first started seeing time travel in literature. Are there older examples? Is there an analog from antiquity -- some similar concept articulated in an ancient culture or mythology? A folk tale?
posted by blueshammer to religion & philosophy (13 comments total)

Prophesies and prophetic dreams are usually taken to be visions of rather than visits to the future. But are the actual texts that unambiguous?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 9:19 AM on November 20, 2006

There are folktales in which a person goes to a magical place for a short time and when he returns he's suddenly very old, or he's still young and everyone else is old. So the elasticity of time is a traditional theme, but it's not quite science fictional time travel.
posted by zadcat at 9:30 AM on November 20, 2006

Not antiquity, but the Comte de Saint-Germain (Voltaire: « qui sait tout, et qui ne meurt jamais » to which the funnier and more sceptical Frederick the Great replied « C’est un comte pour rire ») a famed charlatan of eighteenth-century courts, would constantly drop hints that he had been present at the last supper and various other ancient historical events.

The Arthurian ‘once and future King’ idea might file under that, too, though I’m not sure if there was lots of hanging around in another world involved or not.
posted by Aidan Kehoe at 9:41 AM on November 20, 2006 [1 favorite]

Dickens's A Christmas Carol is 1843, so it's on the low end of this scale.
posted by Pastabagel at 9:53 AM on November 20, 2006

I wonder if that really counts as time travel, since Ebeneezer is just given a view of the past, a memory essentially. He's not actually there in a way that he can interact with anything.
posted by knave at 10:20 AM on November 20, 2006

If A Christmas Carol counts, then I suppose the Revelation of St. John would probably also count, right?
posted by Hildago at 10:38 AM on November 20, 2006

Like zadcat says, going to the future (and then not being able to get back) is a pretty common theme in folk tales. For instance, the Japanese folk tale Urashimataro is so close to Rip Van Winkle that I don't bother telling it to kids; they've already heard it. Same deal with Karl Katz from Grimm's fairy tales, and Honi HaM'agel from the Talmud.

I can't think of any folk tales in which people go to the past, though.
posted by vorfeed at 10:55 AM on November 20, 2006

Ebeneezer also gets a view of his future...third ghost.
posted by Gungho at 10:56 AM on November 20, 2006

I was also going to mention the traditional "Rip Van Winkle" fairy tales / folk stories. (According to WP, the story that we today think about was written in 1819 by Washington Irving, but it's based on a much older story or stories, possibly dating back as far as the 3rd century AD to a Chinese folk tale called "Ranka.")

Since it's not unknown for people who are sick or injured to be comatose for periods of time and then awake, it's not hard to see where basis for the "sleeper"-type stories might come from. It's basically taking a known phenomenon and exaggerating it.

That seems as though it's probably as close to a "time machine" as you're likely to find in pre-scientific cultures, unless you count 'visions' or 'dreams' of the past or future, which there's probably a lot more basis for.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:22 PM on November 20, 2006

And of course, Sleeping Beauty.

Things like the Fountain of Youth, and the Greek gods granting someone immortality or eternal youth, are in a similar vein to the sleeper stories. (Though not strictly time travel)
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:05 PM on November 20, 2006

Yeah, I had come across the eternal sleeper stuff, and of course the prophets, but it's just strange to me that the idea that someone might dislike the outcome of an event and use mystical powers to go back into time to change it was unique to the late 19th century.
posted by blueshammer at 2:35 PM on November 20, 2006

There are folktales in which a person goes to a magical place for a short time and when he returns he's suddenly very old, or he's still young and everyone else is old. So the elasticity of time is a traditional theme, but it's not quite science fictional time travel.

Japanese Folktale "Urashima Taro": Young kind man saves a sea turtle, sea turtle takes him to a paradise under the sea, young man spends some time there and comes back to find that he doesn't recoginze anybody in his village because hundreds of years have passed, when he opens a box he brought back from under the sea, he turns old.

But I can't think of any other (famous) pre-1800s Japanese folktale or story that takes someone back in time to change the course of events, like blueshammer points out. The ones that I can think of are all in the vein of "immortality" or time-traveling into the future, and even then, the traveler can't come back. Like the Urashima tale above, time isn't something people have control over, and it's more like a punishment if anything.

The Japanese Wikipedia entry on "Time Machine" points out that Wells' Time Machine was linked to the Industrial Revolution when physical travel become much faster than people were used to until then because of technological advancements, which then expanded to the concept of time itself. So maybe it's not so much the "time-travelling" part but the idea of "being able to control time" that's relatively new.

Interesting question.
posted by misozaki at 5:26 PM on November 20, 2006

Whoops, I just noticed vorfeed's comment! Sorry!
posted by misozaki at 5:28 PM on November 20, 2006