The Most Universal of Narrative Forms

Thompson opens with the plainest of foundations: “the teller of stories has everywhere and always found eager listeners.” The preface announces the book’s occasion — half a century of collecting had produced a mass of recorded tales so overwhelming that it remained unknown outside a small circle of specialists, and no work existed that could serve the student of literature, anthropology, or psychology as a guide. The Folktale, published by the Dryden Press in 1946 and signed from Bloomington, Indiana, supplies that guide, and it proceeds from the conviction that scholarship had begun to see “the oral tale as the most universal of all narrative forms.” Thompson’s subject is the traditional prose tale, written or oral, whose defining mark is not fantasy but tradition itself: where the modern writer strives for originality, the teller of a folktale is “proud of his ability to hand on that which he has received.” The opening chapters fix the terminology the rest of the field still uses. The Märchen receives its standard definition — “a tale of some length involving a succession of motifs or episodes. It moves in an unreal world without definite locality or definite characters and is filled with the marvelous” — and is distinguished from the novella, which unfolds in a pseudo-realistic world of definite time and place; from the hero tale, which clusters adventures around a single figure; and from legend and tradition, which ask for belief. Thompson also states at the outset that oral and written tradition cannot be fully separated: tales pass from unlettered tellers into the great literary collections and back out again, and the interrelation is among the most baffling problems the folklorist encounters.

The Complex Tale from Ireland to India

Part Two, the longest in the book, surveys the tales current in the territory Thompson treats as a single story-sharing region, running from Ireland to India. The complex tale — the many-motif Märchen — is organized by subject: supernatural adversaries, supernatural helpers, magic and marvels, lovers and married couples, tasks and quests, faithfulness, good and bad relatives, the higher powers, the three worlds, and realistic tales, closing with an account of the origin and history of the complex tales. Every tale is keyed to its number in the Aarne-Thompson Types of the Folk-Tale, and for each Thompson gives both a summary and a digest of the scholarship. The working of the method shows in the details: Antti Aarne’s studies of the magic-object tales (Types 564 and 565, among others) reconstruct probable original forms, and Aarne constructs an “archetype” — the term here is the folklorist’s, meaning the inferred parent version of a tale, not the psychologist’s. A following chapter treats the simple tale: jests and anecdotes, animal tales, formula tales, legends and traditions. The survey then reaches backward and outward — a chapter on the folktale in ancient literature covers Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian, Greek, and Latin remains, and another follows European-Asiatic tales into Indonesia, Africa, and North America. The cumulative effect is a working atlas: what tales exist, in what versions, over what ground, with what recorded history.

Type and Motif: The Apparatus of Comparative Folklore

The book’s fourth part, “Studying the Folktale,” documents the classificatory system Thompson himself built. The definitions are exact. “A type is a traditional tale that has an independent existence”; a motif is “the smallest element in a tale having a power to persist in tradition,” and most motifs fall into three classes — actors, items of background, and single incidents, the last comprising the great majority. A complete tale such as Cinderella, in Marian Roalfe Cox’s analysis which Thompson reproduces, is a sequence of motifs in relatively fixed order and combination. On this distinction rests the double apparatus: a type-index for surveying tales within a region that shares a common store, a motif-index for displaying similarity of elements worldwide. Thompson states the rule that governs their use: “A type-index implies that all versions of a type have a genetic relationship; a motif-index makes no such assumption.” The chapter also records the apparatus’s history — the earlier alphabetical catchword lists of Jacobs, Feilberg, and the Americanists Lowie and Kroeber (extended in Boas’s Tsimshian Mythology) confused types with motifs, and it was Kaarle Krohn who saw that a comprehensive classification had to come first, entrusting the work to Aarne with the advice of Hackman, Olrik, Bolte, and von Sydow. Aarne’s own stated purpose, quoted at length, is practical: a common system by which any scholar can locate in a moment the material any collection holds.

The Historic-Geographic Method and What It Can Establish

Thompson devotes a full chapter to the technique Kaarle Krohn perfected, known as the historic-geographic or Finnish method, and his exposition remains the standard English account. The goal is “nothing less than a complete life history of a particular tale.” The procedure is exacting: the student assembles every findable variant — in some studies five hundred to a thousand — labels each by date and place, arranges the literary versions chronologically and the oral versions geographically, breaks the tale into traits that can be studied independently, and works toward the original form, the place and time of origin, and the routes of dissemination. Thompson is precise about the method’s nature and therefore its limits: it is “essentially a technique for the study of the dissemination of oral tales,” and it requires both a large number of versions and enough complexity to permit analysis. He records the objections from within the discipline — von Sydow’s doctrine of oikotypes, the special local forms of a tale that are at home in one country and alien elsewhere, and his argument that tales travel by long jumps rather than wave-like spread; Wesselski’s insistence on the importance of written versions. The adjoining chapter on theories of the folktale is equally clear about what the method displaces. Thompson writes that the Freudians “have also done much ‘interpreting’ of folktales as expression of dreams of suppressed desires” and that such interpreters have not “been realistic in their approach to the problem of folktale origins”; Saintyves’s ritual-origin readings of Perrault he reports as seeming to most judicious scholars “not less fantastic than those he seeks to replace.” The survey states what can be documented and declines to speculate past it.

The Trickster Cycle and the North American Indian Tale

Part Three carries the survey outside the Ireland-to-India region by concentrating on a single body of material, the tales of the North American Indians, chosen to afford comparison with Europe and Asia. Thompson maps the mythological worlds region by region — Southwest, California, Eskimo, Northeast Woodland, Iroquois, Central Woodland, North Pacific Coast — then gives the trickster his own chapter, identifying trickster stories as the most characteristic feature of North American Indian tales. Coyote is familiar to the tribes of California, the Southwest, the Plateau, and the Plains; on the North Pacific Coast the trickster is also the Transformer, Raven or Mink or Blue Jay; the Plains know him as Old Man, Nihansan, Inktomi, or Sitkonski, the Central Woodlands as Manabozho or Wiskedjak. Thompson’s central observation is the double concept: the same figure appears elsewhere as the serious culture hero and in some cases the creator, so that a trickster like Coyote may take any of three roles — “the beneficent Culture Hero, the clever deceiver, or the numskull.” Chapters on test and hero tales, journeys to the other world, and animal wives and husbands complete the treatment, with motif references throughout keyed to the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature.

The Folktale is the comparative reference the analytic fairy-tale tradition presupposes. When von Franz interprets a tale in The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, or Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, the tale she interprets is a type with a documented range of variants, and Thompson’s survey is where that documentation is marshalled; when Zimmer retells and reads a story in The King and the Corpse, the folklorist’s apparatus locates its relatives across continents. Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion and Graves’s The Greek Myths order adjacent material on other principles — a morphology of the sacred, a mythography of a single culture — where Thompson orders by genetic descent and geographic spread. The book states what exists, where it has travelled, and what the record can support. The psychological readings on this shelf state what the tales mean. Thompson’s survey is the ground on which those readings either stand or fail to.