Antti Aarne remains one of Finland’s best known folklorists abroad. Aarne’s research at the beginning of the 20th century still forms the basis for folklore studies, and it has attracted much comment over the course of a century.

If Aarne’s studies fail quite to reach the level of Indiana Jones, his diligent, dogged, nigh pedantic work earned him a place among the great classifiers of history alongside Carl Linnaeus.

While collecting material in Moscow for his doctoral dissertation, Aarne observed how difficult it was to search for research material in foreign folklore collections. An idea dawned upon him: if every European archive organised its collection in a uniform way according to the most common folklore, items could be found much more effectively.

From the very beginning, the project was implemented by an international team. To support the work the Folklore Fellows researcher network was founded, and it still operates to this day. Aarne’s colleagues in the project were the Finns Kaarle Krohn and Oskar Hackman, the Dane Axel Olrik, the German Johannes Bolte and the Swede Carl W. von Sydow. Aarne began work by collecting texts from transcriptions of Finnish and Karelian fairy tales, Danish folklore and the works of the Brothers Grimm. He sorted the material into subcategories – animal, miracle, novella, and trickster tales –and defined the reoccurring narratives that appeared in many versions (tale type). He then assigned fixed names, a short characterisation and a numerical code to the tale types. References to archival sources and printed versions were also appended. For example, the code “Aa 510A” refers to Cinderella.

In the attainment of his goal, Aarne exceeded all expectations – his typology became a functional tool for folklorists, literary scholars, anthropologists and philologists alike. Naturally, there were still problems and logical incongruities in the first version, which Aarne himself readily admitted. Nevertheless, he emphasised the practical utility of his work. Aarne’s work was continued by the US folklorist Stith Thompson from the 1920s to the 1960s and by the German literary scholar Hans-Jörg Uther at the beginning of the new millennium. Each scholar contributed his initial to the abbreviation of the classification system, which is today the ATU (Aarne, Thompson, Uther) Classification of Folk Tales.

“The early idea of the Folklore Fellows”, Folklore Fellows

Sources:

• Apo, Satu. “Antti Aarne – globaali menestyjä. (Antti aarne – a global success)” Helsingin yliopiston kirjaston tiedotuslehti 1/2005
• Apo, Satu. Aarne, Antti. National Biography online publication. Accessed October 8, 2015.
• Helsingin yliopiston opettaja- ja virkamiesmatrikkeli 1640–1917
• Luomala, Katharine. Review. American Anthropologist, New Series, vol. 65, no. 3, part 1 (Jun., 1963), pp 747-750.