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The Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index) is a catalogue of folktale types used in folklore studies.The ATU index is the product of a series of revisions and expansions by an international group of scholars: Originally published in German by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne (1910), [1] the index was translated into English, revised, and expanded by American folklorist Stith Thompson (1928 ...
The motif-index and the ATU indices are regarded as standard tools in the study of folklore. For example, folklorist Mary Beth Stein said that, "Together with Thompson's six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, with which it is cross-indexed, The Types of Folktale constitutes the most important reference work and research tool for comparative folk-tale analysis. [1]
The word folklore, a compound of folk and lore, was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms, [6] who contrived the term as a replacement for the contemporary terminology of "popular antiquities" or "popular literature". The second half of the word, lore, comes from Old English lār 'instruction'. It is the knowledge and traditions of a ...
Common parlance conflates fairy tales with beast fables and other folktales, and scholars differ on the degree to which the presence of fairies and/or similarly mythical beings (e.g., elves, goblins, trolls, giants, huge monsters, or mermaids) should be taken as a differentiator.
In folkloristics, morphology is the study of the structure of folklore and fairy tales.. Some pioneering work in this field was begun in the nineteenth century, such as Marian Roalfe Cox's work on Cinderella, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin and, Cap O' Rushes, Abstracted and Tabulated with a Discussion of Medieval Analogues and Notes.
English folklore has continued to differ according to region, although there are shared elements across the country. [3] The folktales, characters and creatures are often derived from aspects of English experience, such as topography, architecture, real people, or real events. [4]
The definition can also be extended to include not just oral epics, but latrinalia, many forms of childlore (skipping-rope rhymes, the words of counting-out games etc.), and limericks; [5] as well as including anonymous or improvised poems. [6]
Fairy tales are stories that range from those in folklore to more modern stories defined as literary fairy tales. Despite subtle differences in the categorizing of fairy tales, folklore, fables, myths, and legends, a modern definition of the literary fairy tale, as provided by Jens Tismar's monograph in German, [1] is a story that differs "from an oral folk tale" in that it is written by "a ...