Comparative & computational folkloristics

About the Folklore Database

Name: Folklore Database
Creator: Jonathan Fielder-White
License: https://folkloredatabase.com/terms

The Folklore Database (formerly known as the Mythology Database - www.mythologydatabase.com) is a free to use, academically focused resource dedicated to the global study of folklore narratives. Drawing from hundreds of sources, the database offers the ability to search in multiple ways, view world maps of narrative dispersal, and read texts all translated into English.

Our aim is to support scholars in discovering and analyzing folkloric content. Much of the content is paired with metadata, including geospatial information, mythemes, motifs, cultural origin, and bibliographic citations. This makes it possible to perform comparative studies across time, geography, and theme.

The database incorporates and expands upon foundational resources including the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index and the motif catalogues of Stith Thompson and Yuri Berezkin's Analytical Catalogue amongst other corpa.

The database builds on top of these and other data sources, through translations, error corrections, additional metadata, and addditional narratives created to help the discovery of mythemes which in turn aids the comparative method.

Currently mythemes are being created using a multi-pass method via an open source Large Language Model (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B). This process will be documented and made public in the near future.

The site is curated and maintained by Jonathan Fielder-White, an independent researcher specializing in Indo-European mythology and religious history. The goal is to make Folklore (folktale, mythology, legend) more accessible, better understood, and more rigorously studied, without distortion or bias.

If you use the database in your research, teaching, or publications, please cite it appropriately, including the original sources where available; as it represents many thousands of hours of scholarship, translation, and technical development and those who have originally created the data should be recognised.

If data appears on this site which is under copyright please let us know and we will endeavour to remove it as quickly as possible.

If you see data on the site that has errors, please let us know and we will endevour to correct it as quickly as possible.

If you wish to get access to data for projects and research, then please contact us, we do our best to help

How to cite: Fielder-White, Jonathan (2026). The Folklore Database. https://folkloredatabase.com

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Where applicable, users should also cite the relevant original sources, catalogues, and classification systems, including Berezkin, ATU, Thompson, and other cited authorities, alongside the page accessed and the last time accessed.

Editorial annotations and database enhancements © Jonathan Fielder-White licensed under CC BY 4.0. Berezkin-derived narrative and metadata licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Full rights information can be found here.
All rights are reserved in the database structure, selection, arrangement, metadata, classifications, software, interface design, and original editorial content.

Important: The Folklore Database expressly reserves all rights in relation to text and data mining, automated extraction, scraping, machine learning, dataset creation, and the training, development, validation, or improvement of artificial intelligence technologies or systems. No part of this website or database may be scraped, copied, reproduced, harvested, downloaded in bulk, or otherwise used for AI training or commercial data extraction without prior written permission.

Designed and Developed by Jonathan Fielder-White.
© 2024–2026 Crecganford / Jonathan Fielder-White. All rights reserved.