In my inaugural post, I mentioned wanting to help researchers and storytellers by compiling folktale variants. To find variants, the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index is indispensable.
The ATU index is a tool folklorists use to catalogue folktales with similar plots. It was created by Antti Aarne in 1910, translated and expanded by Stith Thompson in 1928 and 1961 (previously known as AT or AaTh ), then revised by Hans-Jörg Uther in 2004.
All three volumes are online:
Volume 1: Animal Tales, Tales of Magic, Religious Tales, and Realistic Tales
Volume 2: Tales of the Stupid Ogre, Anecdotes and Jokes, and Formula Tales
Volume 3: Appendices
You can even read stories organized by tale type:
Multilingual Folk Tale Database
D. L. Ashliman also has a website that sometimes lists tales by their type:
Beauty and the Beast (425C)
Cinderella (510A)
The Fox and the Cat (105)
Various countries have their own national indices that use the ATU system as a foundation:
Types of Japanese Folktales by Keigo Seki
Index of Spanish Folktales, Classified According to Antti Aarne's "Types of the Folktale" by Ralph Steele Boggs
Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America by Ernest Warren Baughman
The Types of the Folktale in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Spanish South America by T. L. Hansen
Some resources, usually related to tale type indices, are available in non-English languages:
Enzyklopädie des Märchens
Ruthenia's Russian Folktale Index
The above is just a sampling of what's out there. Copyright laws, language barriers, and sheer quantity of material make it impossible to be comprehensive. But this should be a good start.
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