Back

A note on tale types:

Tales in the oral tradition exist in many versions across cultures and centuries. These have the same basic plot but very diverse embellishments.

Folklorists have numbered the plots in what is generally known as the ATU (Aarne-Thompson-Uther) tale type index.

E.g. every tale with a jealous queen, an exiled princess hiding in the company of outlaws, fake death, and resurrection is ATU 709 - Snow White.

Some cultures have their own indices, however!

Note, the ATU catalog (3 volumes) is available for download here (ending decades of anguish for researchers):
https://edition.fi/kalevalaseura/catalog?fbclid=IwAR0zUQr8Ou8WUR0OsL_yCjqPtTydE74IYqZWWLq9ZF1NTuLfRmjY83YBwws

@TarkabarkaHolgy Goodness the ATU takes me back, I remember railing against the categorisation as a student. Well, shouting on my own in the library.

@Printdevil Oh yeah it's definitely flawed, even the updated version I have had meltdown moments when I tracked down a reference and it was nowhere near the type I expected... Same with the motif index

@TarkabarkaHolgy You're in a lucky era though, my university library wasn't even computerised till I was half way through my degree. It was cards or crowd around the microfiche. Having the indices as as searchable PDF? I'd nearly go back and finish my PhD :)

@Printdevil Lol, I was in-between thanks to the Hungarian system. I did get to use card catalogs, offline catalogs, the actual paper ATU at the reference library (and the AaTh before that), and then computers and now the PDF