Ghost of a flea

Folklore

Here is another resource I do not have time to look at properly (via Venemous Kate). I love the numbered typology of folklore used to make sense of this electronic text database. Take "name of the helper" tales, for example.

The Name of the Helper. Folktales of type 500, in which a mysterious and threatening helper is defeated when the hero or heroine discovers his name.
Rumpelstiltskin (Germany).
Doubleturk (Germany).
Mistress Beautiful (Germany).
Dwarf Holzrührlein Bonneführlein (Germany).
Nägendümer (Germany).
Kugerl (Germany).
Purzinigele (Austria).
Tarandandò (Italy).
Winterkölbl (Hungary).
Kruzimugeli (Austria).
The Girl Who Could Spin Gold from Clay and Long Straw (Sweden).
Tom Tit Tot (England).
Duffy and the Devil (England).
Whuppity Stoorie (Scotland).
Peerie Fool [Peerifool] (Orkney Islands).
Gwarwyn-a-throt (Wales).
The Rival Kempers (Ireland).
Penelop (Wales).
Kinkach Martinko (a Slav folktale).

And then... I should have explained the typology in question is the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index, an eclectic classification scheme for folkloric stories. One of my side projects is thinking about chimneys as routes for exchanging good things and bad things. Good things can come down the chimney such as elves bearing presents but only in exhange for milk and cookies. Equally, there are things that want to get into the house through the chimney and you may find yourself having to reach inside to close the flue lest they make off with your child. The best example of this latter example of negative-reciprocity is from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, perhaps the most terrifying scene ever filmed.

Type numbers were assigned to the major Indo-European tales by Finnish scholar Antii Aarne in his 1910 book (revised in 1928), The Types of the Folktale. For Aarne, a type was a collection of similar stories that bear a historical relationship to each other. Therefore, to say that a story is an example of type 510A means, strictly speaking, that the story is historically derived from some of the others in the type. In other words, the type index was not begun as a purely descriptive tool, but as an instrument of the theory of folk-tale dispersion within the Indo-European culture areas.

The great U.S. folklorist Stith Thompson added a second, more detailed type of numerical index, the motif index, which catalogs smaller elements of a story and implies no historical connection between stories listed together. Thompson then revised Aarne's Types of the Folktale to include the motifs most commonly associated with each type.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at December 4, 2003 09:03 AM

Comments

Posted by: cbk at December 5, 2003 02:07 PM

Posted by: Nicholas Packwood at December 6, 2003 06:08 PM

Posted by: Joseph Campbell at November 3, 2004 10:23 PM