WEBSITES DEALING WITH FOLKLORE,

STORYTELLING, AND MOTIF INDEXING

Using a motif or type index:

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ANTH/motif.html - Example of how to use the Stith Thompson Motif Index.

http://storydynamics.com/Articles/Finding_and_Creating/types.html - Doug Lipman’s article In Search of the Folktale on using a type index.

Descriptions of Unique Resources (but the data are not web-based):

http://www.ace.lu.se/projects/esa140.html - Description of the Motif-Index of Southeast Asian Folk Literature at Lund University, Sweden.

http://members.tripod.com/~THSlone/1001PNGnights.html - Announcement of 2001 publication of Thomas Slone’s One Thousand One Papua New Guinean Nights, A collection of folktales from PNG, indexed by author, village, original language, province, flora and fauna, and motif.

Specially organized collections of e-stories (there are countless folktale websites with e-stories):

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html - Huge collection of online stories courtesy of D.L. Ashliman. Organize alphabetically by topic.

http://www.indians.org/welker/natlit2a.htm - Large collection of stories of the Indigenous People of the US, organized by nation.

http://www.mainlesson.com/index.shtml - The Baldwin Project: bringing yesterday’s classics to today’s children. Organized by author, book title, story title, and grade level.

http://www.gwu.edu/~folktale/GERM232/3s/introduction.html - Overview, analysis, variants, and motifs of Grimm’s “The Three Sisters” tale.

Specialized electronic resources:

http://www.pantheon.org/mythica.html - The electronic Encyclopedia Mythica (Pantheon Books). An encyclopedia of mythology, folklore, legends, and more. It contains over 6,000 definitions of gods and goddesses, supernatural beings and legendary creatures and monsters from all over the world. Browsable and searchable.

http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~wbarker/fairies/grimm/ - The complete tales of the Brothers Grimm, the 1884 edition, translated by Margaret Hunt.

http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~emily/Docs/lang.html - Alphabetical index of the story titles from Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books. This page does not include e-stories.

Web search strategies:

Some web search engines are more effective than others in retrieving sites. For example, a search on the phrase “german folktales” has the following results:

Search Engine	Websites Recalled
Google	168
Alltheweb	137
Altavista	89
Hotbot	79
Wisenut	66
Ask Jeeves	56
Teoma	56
Webcrawler	50
Metacrawler	30
Northernlight	18

Each search engine treats queries slightly differently, so look at the “search help” link if there is one for your favorite search engine. Most searches are returned organized by relevance (i.e., the first one should be the most useful), but how the machines calculate relevance varies (for more information, see: http://www.searchengines.com/searchBasics1.html). The end result is that a thorough search entails using more than one engine.