Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folk Tales

There are many different folk tales in the world, but many tales are variations on a limited number of themes. The classification system originally designed by Aarne, and later revised first by Thompson and later by Uther, is intended to bring out the similarities between tales by grouping variants of the same tale under the same ATU category.

Below is the full tree of the ATU classification. Click on a title to see all the stories within that class.