Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index: Same Number, Not Same Ancestor

What does a tale-type number say?

Stith Thompson defined a tale type as a traditional tale with a life of its own. It can be told as a complete story and does not need another tale to make sense, as English Wikipedia quotes his 1946 book The Folktale. Each type gets a number. The number places it in a block of related plots.

Take ATU 510A. The 510 sits in the run 500–559, which Aarne set aside in 1910 for tales with a supernatural helper. That run lies inside the tales of magic, numbers 300–749.

The letter marks one form of a type. Aarne's 1910 preface says that letters after a number mark "variierende Formen desselben Typs", that is, "varying forms of the same type" (Translation: Where Tales Began). His list already gives 510 A and 510 B.

The name after the number is a label, not a fixed title. Aarne called 510 A "Aschenbrödel". Uther's 2004 revision calls it Cinderella and renames type 510 as a whole Cinderella and Peau d'Âne, according to English Wikipedia's entry on the index. It also renames 510B, called Catskin in the earlier editions, as Peau d'Asne.

The same entry notes that the names are typical rather than literal. Aarne's 1910 list already shows this: it calls type 545 B "Der gestiefelte Kater (oder der Fuchs als Fürsprecher)", that is, "Puss in Boots (or the fox as advocate)" (Translation: Where Tales Began), so the type also covers tales in which a fox, not a cat, speaks for the hero.

From Aarne's 1910 list to Uther's 2004 catalogue

Sorting tales by plot did not begin with Aarne. English Wikipedia's index entry lists several attempts made before his. Johann Georg von Hahn analyzed some 40 tale "formulae" in 1864, and Sabine Baring-Gould listed 52 "story radicals" in 1866. Svend Grundtvig's Danish system of 134 types was translated by Astrid Lunding in 1910.

Aarne's Verzeichnis der Märchentypen appeared in Helsinki in 1910, as number 3 of the series FF Communications. In its preface, Aarne writes that the list rests on three bodies of tales: Finnish manuscript collections, Grundtvig's Danish collections and the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen. He adds that it makes no claim to be complete.

Stith Thompson's English version, The Types of the Folk-Tale (FF Communications 74), translated and enlarged the list and created what became known as the AT, or AaTh, number system. English Wikipedia's index entry dates it 1928, while its entry on Aarne and German Wikipedia give 1927. Thompson's second revision, The Types of the Folktale (FF Communications 184), followed in 1961.

Thompson also listed motifs, the small story elements that recur in many plots, such as a helpful animal. His Motif-Index of Folk-Literature appeared in 1932–1936 and again, revised, in 1955–1958.

Hans-Jörg Uther's The Types of International Folktales came out in 2004, in three volumes (FF Communications 284–286). It gave the system the name Aarne–Thompson–Uther. As English Wikipedia summarizes his aims, Uther found many earlier descriptions cursory and often imprecise. He added more tales from eastern and southern Europe and dropped examples recorded in only one ethnic group.

The editions behind the timeline can be downloaded as a CSV file, with a source and link for every row.

How are the numbers grouped?

Aarne split the list into three main groups: Tiermärchen, eigentliche Märchen and Schwänke, or animal tales, tales proper and jests (Translation: Where Tales Began). He numbered the whole list in one continuous run. Starting again in each group, he wrote, would have made the labels too complicated. The contents pages of his 1910 list give these ranges.

German Wikipedia's summary of the current index gives the same blocks, with Aarne's German headings beside the English ones, and adds formula tales from number 2000, a group that Aarne's list did not have. Inside the tales of magic, Aarne sorted plots by the kind of supernatural element that drives them. So Little Red Riding Hood's number, 333, sits among supernatural adversaries, and Cinderella's 510 among supernatural helpers.

Type versus motif

A tale type is a whole plot that can be told on its own. A motif is one element inside a plot. The same motif can turn up in many types. Thompson, as English Wikipedia reports, called a motif the smallest element of a tale that has the power to persist in tradition, and in his view that power needed something unusual and striking.

His Motif-Index sorts motifs under letters, from A for mythological motifs to Z for miscellaneous groups. Within each letter, the motifs are numbered.

Aarne's own list shows the difference. He named type 333 "Der Fresssack", or "the glutton" (Translation: Where Tales Began). In it a wolf or another monster swallows people and animals, until all of them are rescued alive from its belly. Aarne sent the reader on to type 123, the wolf and the young goats, where the mother goat cuts open the wolf's stomach.

The rescue from the belly is one element in two plots. Type 333 is listed today as Little Red Riding Hood: English Wikipedia, D. L. Ashliman's online collection of folktexts and German Wikipedia's list all give the tale that number.

Some elements turn up far outside any one plot. The texts set side by side in the flood myths comparison run from Mesopotamian clay tablets to Ovid, Apollodorus, the Satapatha-Brahmana and Mencius. They share an episode, a great flood, without telling one story from start to finish, so that entry compares them episode by episode. Thompson's 1955 Motif-Index gives the destruction of the world its own block among mythological motifs: A1000–A1099, world calamities and renewals.

What a shared number doesn't prove

The Cinderella entry on this site lines up seven dated versions of ATU 510A. Three of them show how far texts under one number can differ at the same point in the plot. Duan Chengshi's Ye Xian, written down before his death in 863, leaves one gold shoe behind and is helped by the bones of a fish. Perrault's heroine of 1697 loses a glass slipper and is helped by a fairy godmother.

The Grimms' Aschenputtel of 1857 loses her left golden slipper on a stairway smeared with pitch. Her help comes from a hazel twig that she plants on her mother's grave.

Where Tales Began calls a difference of this kind motif drift: a difference between recorded versions of the same tale type at the same point in the story. The term describes difference only. It does not claim that the glass slipper came from the golden shoe, or that Perrault knew the Chinese story. Nor does it say that either version is closer to a first telling.

The site uses the same term for recorded versions of a single myth, which have no type number.

A shared ATU number means that the texts were judged to follow the same plot. On its own, the number does not show that one text descends from another or that the two share an ancestor, and it does not rule either out. This site marks a direction between two versions only when published research supports a textual relation between them; otherwise the versions stand side by side, as Following the Paper Trail explains. The motif drift table in the Cinderella entry draws no arrows between Ye Xian, Perrault and the Grimms.

Why do folklorists still argue about the index?

The index grew out of a school that did look for origins. As English Wikipedia's entry on Julius Krohn summarizes it, the historic-geographic method compared variant texts to identify an "original" version and its origin. Aarne developed that method further. His 1910 preface says that folktales "wandern ganz besonders leicht", that is, "wander especially easily" (Translation: Where Tales Began), from region to region and from people to people.

Joseph Jacobs, according to English Wikipedia's Cinderella entry, tried to rebuild the tale's original as "The Cinder Maid." He compared features common to hundreds of European variants. These were claims about where tales began and how they spread, made by the index's builders and their contemporaries. A tale keeps its number whether or not anyone accepts them.

Criticism of the index itself has come from several sides, as English Wikipedia's index entry summarizes it. Vladimir Propp, of the Russian Formalist school of the 1920s, objected that the index ignores what each element does in the story. Tales that share elements can then be split apart, while very different tales can end up in one type.

In the same entry's account, Uther wrote in 2009 that Thompson's focus on oral tradition sometimes neglected older written versions. He also found eastern and southern Europe under-represented. Thompson himself had said that the catalogue might well be called one of the tales of Europe, West Asia and the lands settled by their peoples.

Alan Dundes, an outspoken critic, still counted the type and motif indexes among a folklorist's most valuable tools, as English Wikipedia reports his 1997 critique.

Do regional catalogues use the same numbers?

Tales left out of the international list can still have numbers in regional or national catalogues, as English Wikipedia's index entry notes. Its Motif-Index entry lists motif and tale-type indexes for regions that Thompson covered thinly or not at all, from Ernest Baughman's 1966 index of the folktales of England and North America to Hasan El-Shamy's 1995 guide for the Arab world. Nai-tung Ting's 1978 index of Chinese folktales, according to English Wikipedia's Ye Xian entry, has a type 510A, Cinderella, in which the heroine's helper is a fish.

A label means what its catalogue says it means. English Wikipedia's entry on Vasilisa the Beautiful reports that Russian scholarship files the tale as SUS 480В*, Stepmother and Step-daughter, in the East Slavic catalogue. The SUS label uses the Cyrillic letter В, and the sources checked for this page do not say how SUS letters correspond to the Latin letters of AT and ATU. In that tale a doll from the heroine's dead mother helps her through the tasks set by the witch Baba Yaga.

The same entry says that Jack V. Haney classified the tale as AT 480B* in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther index. The ATU list excerpted on German Wikipedia, which follows Uther's 2015 German catalogue, gives 480B* to a different plot: three sisters set out to rescue their little brother. The two encyclopedias therefore give 480B* under two prefixes, AT and ATU, which mark two versions of the international index. The sources checked for this page do not settle whether the label changed plots between them.