Aarne 1910 Tale-Type Index

In 1910 the Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne published the Verzeichnis der Märchentypen — the first systematic catalogue of folktale types, and the founding document of what became, through Stith Thompson's revisions (1928, 1961) and Hans-Jörg Uther's (2004), the Aarne–Thompson–Uther (ATU) system used by folklorists everywhere. Type 300 is still the Dragon-Slayer, type 510 is still Cinderella, because Aarne numbered them here first.

This dataset is, to our knowledge, the first complete machine-readable edition of that founding catalogue: 603 rows covering every numbered type and lettered subtype, with the German title and description, the catalogue's full section structure, group captions, Aarne's cross-references to Grundtvig's Danish index (Gg) and the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Grimm), the printed page number — and an English gloss for each of the 533 titled types.

Provenance, honestly labeled

The rows were parsed from the proofread German Wikisource transcription of FFC 3 (status fertig, proofread twice against the scans), page by page, with the parse verified against the printed table of contents. The 1910 source text is public domain worldwide (Aarne died in 1925); the transcription of a public-domain text adds no new copyright; the structuring and the English glosses are our own work, released CC0. Unlike the later editions of the index — 1928, 1961, and 2004 all remain in copyright — this edition can be redistributed, embedded, and built upon without restriction.

What's in a row

type_label (e.g. 313 A), numeric type_start/type_end for ranges, subtype, title_de, description_de, title_en (gloss), the catalogue structure (part — Tiermärchen / Eigentliche Märchen / Schwänke — division, subsection, and nested group_label/group_title captions such as 505–508 Der dankbare Tote), grundtvig_no, grimm_no, and page.

One caveat for careful users: this is the 1910 numbering. The great majority of numbers survive unchanged into ATU 2004, but later editions added, merged, and occasionally renumbered types — treat the numbers as Aarne's, not as a substitute for the current ATU catalogue.

What it's for

Reference tables in folklore databases, historical study of the classification itself, joining against motif-indexed corpora, and training data grounded in a clean-provenance source. It is the "official layer" companion to the Myth Index, which cross-references Thompson motif numbers and carries an aarne_1910_type join column — and to the Grimm KHM Tale-Type Crosswalk, which inverts this catalogue's own grimm_no citations into a per-tale join across the whole Kinder- und Hausmärchen.

Also available on

This dataset is also published, CC0, on two open-data platforms — the same files, mirrored for reach and preservation:

• Hugging Face — huggingface.co/datasets/wheelofheaven/aarne-1910-tale-types
• Kaggle — kaggle.com/datasets/zarazinsfuss/aarne-1910-tale-types