The Mythology and Folklore Database
About...

The Mythology and Folklore Database (mythologydatabase.com) is a freely accessible, academically grounded resource dedicated to the global study of folklore, mythology and traditional narratives. Drawing from hundreds of sources, both primary and secondary, the database offers a vast collection of narrative traditions from cultures all around the world.

Our aim is to support scholars, students, educators, authors, and the general public in discovering and analyzing folkloric content. Much of the content is paired with metadata, from 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 such as the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index and the motif catalogues of Stith Thompson and Yuri Berezkin's Analytical Catalogue. This builds on top of other data sources, corrections have been applied to narratives and data errors found in other sources, translations applied, as well as metadata created to help the discovery of mythemes and better narratives, geospatial data, all to offer a digital resource that is searchable to aid research.

Mythemes have been created using an uncensored open source Large Langauge Model (llama-3.2-8x3b-moe-dark-champion-instruct-uncensored-abliterated-18.4b) due to the narratives often containing language and descriptions regular models would refuse to analyse.

The site is curated and maintained by Jon F. White, an academic specializing in Indo-European mythology and religious history. The goal is to make Folklore (folklore, mythology, legend etc.) 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 orignally created the data should be recognised.

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