One of the most important tools for anyone studying fairy tales or just looking to research them for creative purposes has to be the ATU system.
Okay. Maybe it isn’t the most important. But it’s incredibly helpful.
But what is it? Most people haven’t heard of it, and truthfully it sounds a bit confusing and daunting to use.
Don’t worry. We’ll get through this together. Because I’m going to be referencing the ATU types a lot as we start to look at other fairy tales versions and variations, because there are just so many tales out there. So once we have an understanding of all the numbers and crazy things going on here, it’ll be nothing but smooth sailing after that.
It is confusing at first, which is why I’ve decided to to give you…A Casual Girl’s Guide to Using the ATU Index.
Hi. I’m the casual girl.
The ATU Tale Type Index is a Categorization System
The ATU Tale Type Index, which is only one of its “official names,” is an essential guide for those of us who are trying to find different versions of the fairy tales we already know, or discover tales and types of fairy tales we don’t know. And with thousands of discovered tales around the world, having one big source like that is awesome.
Officially it’s a categorization system, cataloguing fairy tales, folk tales, and fables around the world and filing them neatly away in smaller categories according to their plot. So a story of a girl with a red garment who gets into mischief, usually involving a wolf, will be filed under ATU type 333 (Red Riding Hood type tales), and stories about little helpers who keep their names secret so they can get away with stealing babies or wives would be ATU 500 (Rumplestiltskin type tales).
In reality it’s a little more complicated than that. Because of course it is. So here’s a quick breakdown of what you need to know about the ATU Tale Type Index, which is what I like to call it most often, and how I’m going to use it in the future.
ATU Stands for Aarne-Thompson-Uther
These aren’t just a handful of words or names. They’re the names of the men who created the system: Antti Aarne, Stith Thompson, and Hans-Jörg Uther. Aarne started the project in order to categorize Scandinavian tales and published his findings in 1910. Thompson translated it into English in 1928 and then revised and added tales in 1961, officially creating the AT or Aarne-Thompson system for cataloguing folk stories. Uther stepped up in 2004 to further revise and update the system, and rename poorly titled categories.
Uther called this new publication The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, which is another official title for the system. It’s available in print in three volumes, but since each volume is essentially $100-200 a piece…pretty much no one except for really dedicated libraries has it.
Fortunately, however…
There is an Online Index
Or rather…there was. But we’ll get to that in a second.
It’s titled the Multilingual Folk Tale Database but don’t be fooled by the name. It’s the ATU index without the full bibliography. It has links to all the tale types, some of which also include a list of links to specific fairy tales for you to read. So if you start to browse the tale type 510, which is commonly known as the Cinderella tale type, you’ll get a fair number of links to stories to read. It looks like this on the website.
But unfortunately it’s a work in progress. Not all of the tales known to exist under each tale type are included yet. So if you’re looking for something more obscure, like the Twelve Dancing Princesses (ATU 306), you’ll only get the most famous story the Grimm Brothers collected, and not the others that exist out there in the world.
And others do exist. I’m a big fan of the Romanian version myself.
The other downside is, well…it got taken down. The current link I have provided actually takes you to an old web archive version of the website, meaning it’s not entirely fully functional. There is another website here that expands the AT catalogue of tales, but it doesn’t link out to example stories. Unfortunately, it looks as though we’ll have to rely on the web archive of the Multilingual Folk Tale Database…or try to get our hands on some cheap copies of Uther’s books.
All that said, it’s extremely helpful to start here. Once you know the number and the name of the tale type, you can search in other databases to find more stories. Just googling the tale type can get you started. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good starting point.
But wait a second. Numbers? Names? Can’t I just look up Cinderella?
Well…yes. But there are so many stories and types of stories out there. Cinderella is just one name for a story with several different versions, with names like “Cenerentola,” “The Fire-blower,” and “Katie Woodencloak.” So you need to learn how to…
Think in Numbers and Descriptions
Each tale type has a number and a catchy name attached. Some of them can be really specific, and others are just funny. Some have different subcategories. For instance, tale type 510 (aka Cinderella or Cap o’ Rushes), has two subcategories. Here’s what they look like on the online index.
And then, below that it’ll have examples I showed you before.
Not all the tale types have subcategories, and some of them have many subcategories. ATU 425, for instance, has 12 subcategories. You might recognize its most famous, ATU 425C — Beauty and the Beast.
Are all the tale types named after iconic fairy tales? Only the most famous. Others are descriptor names. They can be pretty straightforward, like numbers 425-449, which deal with supernatural or enchanted husbands.
Or the descriptors can be surprisingly off the wall. Here are a few of my personal favorites.
ATU 34 – “The Wolf Dives into the Water for Reflected Cheese”
ATU 247 – “Every Mother Thinks Her Child Is the Most Beautiful”
ATU 322 – “Magnet Mountain Attracts Everything”
ATU 570 – “Bunnies Beware the King”
ATU 674 – “Incest Averted – Talking Animals”
ATU 678 – “The King Transfers his Soul to a Parrot”
ATU 1152 – “The Ogre Overawed by Displaying Objects”
ATU 1240 – “Man Sitting on Branch of Tree Cuts it Off”
ATU 1288 -“‘These are not my feet'”
ATU 1718 – “God Can’t Take a Joke”
No really. Those are the names. You can check me on the website.
Now, those are the basics of how a tale type is defined. First by a number, and then a matching description. But how did we get to those numbers? Well, let’s back up and look at the big picture.
There are Seven Major Categories
In the above picture of the Cinderella example, where it described the tales, you might have noticed categories under the title “510: Cinderella and Cap o’ Rushes.” These mention supernatural helpers and tales of magic. Those categories and subcategories are part of how the system breaks up tales to better archive them. First, there are the seven broad categories all tales are filed under.
Animal Tales – 1-299
Tales of Magic – 300-749
Religious Tales – 750-849
Realistic Tales – 850-999
Tales of the Stupid Ogre (Giant, Devil) 1000-1199
Anecdotes and Jokes – 1200-1999
Formula Tales – 2000-2399
Generally, most of the fairy tales I work with are under the Tales of Magic category. That’s generally where you’ll find the most popular tales, like the princesses and the dragon slayers and so on. Most of your well-known fables would go under Animal Tales. So the story of the mouse freeing a trapped lion by gnawing through its ropes would be ATU 75, or “The Help of the Weak.” Pretty much all of Aesop’s famous tales are there.
I do sometimes dip into other categories. For instance ATU 900 and 901 are called “King Thrushbeard” and “Taming of the Shrew,” and I’ve done a lot of work looking at those, both for fairy tales and with Shakespeare studies. But for the most part, the really popular fairy tales that get retold a lot are going to be between 300 and 750.
Each Major Category has Smaller Subcategories
Under each of the seven major categories, stories are broken up even further. For the Animal Tales, you might see subcategories for wild animals, domestic animals, or wild and domestic animals meeting one another.
For the sake of simplicity, we’ll just look at Tales of Magic for this one.
You start to get an idea of the stories you’ll find in each subcategory when you see the list like this. Beauty and the Beast stories involve enchanted spouses, specifically husbands, so you know you can find it under the Supernatural or Enchanted Wife (Husband) subcategory (and sub-subcategory of “Husband”). Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Bluebeard all face supernatural villains as the main part of their stories (talking wolves, scary witch babynappers, the murderous Bluebeard and his strange wizard counterparts) so they’ll be under the Supernatural Adversaries sub-category.
Is it starting to make sense? Here. Let’s take a quick look at how we might go from start to finish. Let’s use Cinderella again.
The Walkthrough
Let’s assume you know you’re looking for Cinderella stories, but you have no idea what the tale type is. You start at the seven major categories.
Cinderella isn’t an animal, so we should check the next one. Tales of Magic? Glass slippers and fairy godmothers seems pretty magical, so that seems a good place to start.
The first sub-category is Supernatural Adversaries. You’re pretty sure Cinderella doesn’t have any of those, so you move on. Enchanted spouses or relatives? Nope. Supernatural tasks? Well, maybe. You distinctly remember a version where she has to pick lentils out of the ashes, and that seems pretty impossible and sort of supernatural. So you check there first.
But none of the tale types there look familiar. “Three Hairs of the Devil?” “Journey to the Other World?” “Borma Jarizhka?” Okay, maybe those lentils aren’t so supernatural after all. And anyway didn’t she have help?
You check the next subcategory — Supernatural Helpers. Now that sounds more like it. Fairy godmothers and helpful birds definitely qualify.
You click on it and start skimming. And conveniently you see that tale type 510 is named Cinderella. So of course you click on it, and voila! You see your variations of the tale and some examples.
But wait. ATU 510B talks about unnatural love. There are Cinderella stories where the dad wants to marry his daughter? Gross! But weirdly fascinating. Which ones are those?
So you check the examples and suddenly find yourself two hours later reading “Allerleirauh” and wondering how you ended up reading stories about girls disguising themselves in amazing outfits to escape incestuous relationships and marrying unrelated princes and kings instead. You definitely remember looking for traditional Cinderella stories first, but here you are.
I’m not speaking from experience or anything.
But really, it’s a great resource. Unfortunately it’s not perfect. The online database doesn’t link to every story known to exist, and some of the holes it does have are glaringly large. For instance those ATU 510B stories? The list is missing the English “Catskin” and the French “Donkeyskin” which I know fit the tale type and are listed elsewhere. So a lot of the time you have to take the number down and look it up in other places.
But that’s not the only thing still needing work.
Most of the Tales are Indo-European
There’s still a lot of work to integrate tales from Africa, Asia, and South America. So right now, it’s mostly stories from Europe and some small portions of Asia, mostly the western half. So China, Japan, Korea, their stories are missing in large gaps as well. For example, I don’t think the bulk of the Arabian Nights stories are categorized at all.
There’s a lot of work being done by scholars all over the world to change this. They’re also trying to change some of the names to add agency to the story. A lot of the names and descriptors used to be really sexist, or erase the fact that women and girls were the main characters.
For example, ATU 451A used to be called “The Brothers Who were Turned into Birds,” despite the fact that those stories were often about their sister, who had to work to save them. The brothers often had very little screen time in the stories at all. Now, thanks to Uther and other scholars, it’s called “The Sister Seeking her Nine Brothers” (even though the number of brothers enchanted isn’t always nine).
So there’s still work to be done, but it remains the best source to begin one’s search for fairy tales. With luck, and aid from more scholars, the online index especially can be continually updated with stories from all over the world. There are already hundreds of stories we don’t know that are indexed with the ATU system, but there are thousands more we have no idea about here in the western world because there isn’t an easy way to find out about them.
It takes a lot of digging to find new versions of well-known fairy tales or new and exciting fairy tales from Africa, eastern Asia, and South America, and these can be so much more interesting than the same old stories we’ve seen over and over again. And don’t get me wrong, I love a good retelling — otherwise I wouldn’t have this blog, right? — but I love learning about and reading other fairy tales I’ve never seen before.
I believe, like the Grimm brothers, that you can learn a bit about a person’s culture, and even people themselves, by the fairy tales they love and continue to tell. And, like the Grimm brothers, I hate to see these cherished stories die.
So Uther’s work and the work of other teams and scholars around the world to preserve these stories is vital. And while the ATU index isn’t perfect, and even though it got taken down off the more widely accessible internet, I’m grateful to have it handy to help get me started on the exciting journey of find new fairy tales to read and explore.
UPDATE: I updated this blog in July 2020 to fix a few errors and links. With the Multilingual Folk Tale Database officially archived, trying to find the ATU tale types of various stories becomes more difficult. I hope the web archive link continues to be useful to others interested in ATU types.