What was the first time-travelling story?

[Chronos]

While there are about a thousand different versions of the Arthurian legends, and so it’s hard to be sure, I think that the bit about Merlin aging backwards is a fairly recent addition, possibly even originating with T. H. White.

[What_Exit]

@What_Exit

I have to do some digging, I swear there is an ancient story of a man traveling back in time and viewing earlier legendary events. The methods was magical though and not at all science oriented. By ancient I am saying before 1000 AD.

I never did find that older story of time travel I thought I remembered. Maybe it was a just a recent short story told from the perspective of someone from ancient days.

[septimus]

It’s not the first time-travel story—in fact it mentions Wells’ Time Machine—but the 1916 “Enoch Soames” by Max Beerbohm is a fun read.

In the story, Soames travels from June 3, 1897 to, briefly, the British Museum one hundred years in the future. I became aware of it reading an article from the 1997 Atlantic Monthly describing several in the British Museum’s Reading Room June 3, 1997 waiting for Soames to arrive at the appointed hour. They were not disappointed.

[Cartooniverse]

@Chronos

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) is usually credited as being the first time travel story, and Edward Page Mitchell’s “The Clock that Went Backwards” (1881) was the first story about a time machine.

But of course, the true earliest time travel story was “A Revised Account of the Events and Chronology of the Early Inflationary Era, as Based on Direct Observation and Experiementation”, published in the January 2463 edition of Physical Review G.

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