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A tale becomes traditional if it presents situations that are so interesting to think about that people find the story worth repeating. The situations described in the tale identify it: texts Üiat present the same situations are, by definition, variants of the same tale type. The Types of the Folktale was developed in order to facilitate studies of the various tales, and it has been, on me whole, extremely useful for mis purpose. Unfortunately, though, for some of the tale types, the Aarne-Thompson descriptions are inadequate and even misleading.
It has been thirty-six years since the tale type index was last revised, but its problems go back much further than that. Antti Aarne's original list of tale types, published in 1910 as Folklore Fellows Communications no. 3, was fewer than seventy pages long. Intended to be a preliminary catalog of international folktales, it was modesdy based on material from three sources: the Grimms' tales, Gruntvig's Danish tales, and the Finnish folklore archives. In an effort to make the brief folktale summaries meaningful to scholars whom he knew were likely to be familiar with the Grimms' tales, Aarne used tides that reflected those tales. Aarne, who was to write many comparative studies of folktales in the years closely following 1910, was surely aware that analogs to many of these tales existed in southern Europe, the Middle East, and India, and that some of these analogs would not conform to the short description in his catalog. But, in order to do all he did, Aarne had to work efficientiy, and if he had stopped to consider what each tale type was like throughout its entire area of distribution, he would never have finished his list.
The original tale types were thus defined according to folktale tradition as it existed in central and northern Europe. Stith Thompson, in 1928, commented that the absence of references for most of Aarne's types was unfortunate, and he remedied this situation with citations to studies and to variants, including references to Bolte and Polivka's notes to the Grimms' tales. But even in cases where Bolte and Polivka had shown that the Grimms' version was atypical, Thompson did not alter either the descriptions or the tale type numbers. Thompson also added references to...