@Phee wrote:
That’s how I look at it too. It’s like K&H have come to be in possession of newly discovered historical documents that actually have the facts of what happened, instead of the distorted versions of the truth we’ve previously heard in stories that have been told and retold over the centuries.
That’s what I thought initially but I reconsidered that interpretation when I thought about the fact that they have introduced more modern (19th Century) stories like Pinocchio and Frankenstein which have well known origins (unlike the folk tales which have evolved over centuries; the story of Cinderella for example evolved from the tale of Rhodopis which goes back to around 500 BC). So, I decided to believe that there is some sort of mental connection between the worlds in which some of the thoughts of people in Frankenstein’s world, Pinoccio’s world, or any of the others wind up bleeding over into the subconscious of authors like Mary Shelly and Carlo Collodi, who gave us Frankenstein and The Adventures of Pinocchio. This idea is not original – I stole it from Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem, but I like it and I’ll stick with it unless K&H give us an alternative explanation.