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The American Folklife Center (AFC) produces guides for the purpose of directing users to resources and collections in support of research on a range of topics connected to folklife, cultural heritage, and ethnographic documentation.
This guide is part of a series of topical guides focusing on "areas of distinction" within AFC collections, as articulated in the Center's Collection Policy Statement. These topical guides are intended to be curated access points for AFC's rich resources, rather than comprehensive of definitive listings.
This guide provides an introduction to doing research on the topic of folktales using American Folklife Center collections. It serves as a companion piece to two existing guides on Narrative and Verbal Arts and Folklife and Creative Writing in AFC Collections.
The Center's Collection Policy Statement includes "Narrative and Verbal Arts" as an area of distinction for its collection. The Policy statement understands the Narrative and Verbal Arts as "encompass[ing] a wide range of genres including stories, myths, legends, jokes, fan literature, memes, proverbs, folk poetry, and cowboy poetry, as well as premier collections of American English regional dialects, plus collections of Gullah (Sea Islands Creole), Caribbean, and French-based Creole dialects."
While the Folklife and Creative Writing Research guide focuses on the written word in the AFC archives, this guide supports research on oral storytelling. For the purpose of this guide, 'folktales' are stories told orally and passed by word-of-mouth among communities and across generations. Folktales can be either spoken or sung, as in bardic traditions like those from Gaelic and Celtic heritage or among the Bengali painted scroll storytellers called Patua. The AFC archives include substantial collections of audiovisual recordings of professional and community storytellers in various regions of the United States and internationally. They also contain manuscripts, story books, and research writings about the stories and tellers represented in the archive.
The guide has been divided into three sections, each organized according to different points of access.
In the first section, resources are grouped by tale genre:
The second section is dedicated to the International Storytelling Collection, a vast collection of materials from the National Storytelling Festival, hosted yearly in Jonesboro, Tennessee since 1973, and the Festival's parent organizations. This sub-page features resources for researching important storytellers involved in the festival, including:
The third section presents resources according to the cultural community to which the stories or storytellers belong:
