Disentangling the Folklore Hairball

Abstract The ATU tale type index and the Motif Index of Folk-Literature have formed the basis for many comparative folktale studies. While the indices have been used extensively for the study of small groups of folktales and their associated motifs, there have been few attempts of describing a large linguistically and culturally unified corpus through its indexing. The study corpus consists of 2,606 folktales collected by Evald Tang Kristensen in nineteenth century Denmark, which were later indexed according to the second revised edition of the Aarne-Thompson index. We adjust this older index to align with the current ATU index. By creating linked network representations of the ATU index and the MI, as well as updating the Brandt indexing of the Danish folktales, we generate a network with 19,738 nodes and 28,292 edges, where nodes can be ATU numbers, MI numbers, Danish folktales, storytellers, or places of collection. By embedding all the Danish stories in this network, we provide a large-scale overview of the Danish folktale tradition. We introduce two novel interrelated network decomposition methods for the study of folktale collections at corpus scale: fixed points of degree peeling and graph fragments. The resulting analysis of the Danish corpus supports comparison with other traditions. Any collection that is similarly indexed can be embedded in this ATU+MI network and then subjected to the same interrelated graph decompositions.