About The Folklore Database
The Folklore Database (formerly known as the Mythology Database) 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 such as the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index and the motif catalogues of Stith Thompson and Yuri Berezkin's Analytical Catalogue.
The database 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 open source uncensroed Large Language Model fine-tuned for unrestricted content analysis (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 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, J. (2026). The Folklore Database. https://folkloredatabase.com
Where applicable, users should also cite the relevant original sources, catalogues, and classification systems, including Berezkin, ATU, Thompson, and other cited authorities.
Except where otherwise stated, original material created by J.Fielder-White is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
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 Jon Fielder-White.
Š 2025â2026 Crecganford / Jon Fielder-White. All rights reserved.