Origins
The earliest known frame stories can be traced back to ancient India sometime in the first millennium BCE, when the Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra, Syntipas' The Seven Wise Masters, and the fable collections Hitopadesha and Vikram and The Vampire were written. This form gradually spread west through the centuries and became popular, giving rise to such classic frame tale collections as the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), The Decameron, and Canterbury Tales. This format had flexibility in that various narrators could retain the stories they liked or understood, while dropping ones they didn't and adding new ones they heard from other places. This occurred particularly with One Thousand and One Nights, where different versions over the centuries have included different stories.
The use of a frame story in which a single narrative is set in the context of the telling of a story is also a technique with a long history, dating back at least to the beginning section of the Odyssey, in which the narrator Odysseus tells of his wandering in the court of King Alcinous.
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