The MyFolklore Database
About...

The Folklore Database is a free to sue, 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 such as the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index and the motif catalogues of Stith Thompson and Yuri Berezkin's Analytical Catalogue.

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

Currently 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 in more general models. This dataset is expected to be revised in the middle of 2026.

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 (folktale, 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.

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.