Tracing a Version: How Tellers and Texts Are Checked

These are the rules behind every article on Once Upon a Version, written so that any reader can check a page against its sources.

The Telling card

Each article carries a Telling card right after the short answer: nine fields, always in this order, none left blank.

• Tale: the name of the story, in English and in the language of the text.
• Type: the tale type, with the name of whoever classified it, or the kind of work when it is not a folktale.
• Teller: the named teller or author.
• Recorded by: the person who took the telling down.
• Edited by: the person who edited or rewrote it, and in which edition.
• Told: the year and place of the telling.
• Published: the first printing, by periodical or book and year.
• This text: the named edition the article quotes most.
• Earliest known: the earliest record that can be found, and where it is documented.

Telling, recording, editing and publishing are kept apart because they were often done by different people, years apart. When the record is silent, the field says unrecorded; when a step never happened, as with a story its author simply wrote, it says n/a. The card agrees word for word with the article and with the CSV file behind it.

The Voice tag

Every quotation is followed by one line in a typewriter face, the Voice tag. For a told tale it reads told by [teller] · recorded by [collector] · [edition, year], [page or section]. For a written work it names the author in place of the teller and gives the chapter.

Versions side by side

When two or more versions are compared, each is quoted in its own edition and placed next to the other. One paragraph never blends two editions into a single “standard” story. A claim about “the original” always names a teller or an edition and a year, and the word “earliest” is always written as “earliest known,” with a date range when the date is uncertain.

Motif grids and their four states

A motif grid sets texts against motifs. Before any grid is filled, each motif is defined in a table: what counts as present, and which specific changes count as a transformed form. Each cell then takes one of four states:

• present: the motif is in the text as defined.
• absent in the checked text: the motif was not found in the named text checked for this grid. That says nothing about other editions or about a whole culture.
• transformed: the motif appears in one of the listed changed forms, and only those.
• undetermined: the text is damaged, the translation is cut, or the wording is ambiguous. Such a cell is never filled in as absent.

Below every grid the texts compared are listed with their count, for example n = 4 texts checked. Motif counts are recomputed from the table beside the article, and motifs are named by this site's own definitions, not by index numbers.

Likeness is not lineage

Versions that resemble each other are called similar, with shared and differing points both listed. Resemblance is not written up as common origin or influence unless a source documents the route, and no cross-cultural comparison is made without a count.

Which source wins

Sources are ranked by the kind of statement they support. The wording of a tale comes first from the named public-domain edition itself. Publication facts come from the first printing or its scan, checked against library catalogs. Facts about a teller's life, a tale's route or the extent of rewriting come from archival and published research that can be read, ahead of later summaries. A collection's own preface proves only what its compilers said, so when a preface and the research disagree, both are given with their evidence. Encyclopedia summaries can point to a source but are never cited as one.

When a study could not be read in full, the page cites it at the level of the reference, with author, title, publisher, year and DOI where one exists, says whose claim it is, and does not quote it.

Tale-type numbers

A tale-type number is always given with its classifier, in the form “ATU 533, as classified by D. L. Ashliman.” Where no named classification can be read, no number is given, and the Type field names the kind of tale instead.

Quoting and the public domain

A text is quoted at length only when the original, the translation used, any illustration and the scan are all in the public domain in the United States, Germany and France, each country checked separately. A work free in one of the three but not the others is not used anywhere on the site. Works still in copyright are quoted only briefly, one or two short passages at most, with author, title, publisher, year and page. German and French quotations come with this site's own English rendering beside them.

Data files

Each data table can be downloaded beside the article as a CSV file, with a short note giving its title, its license and the source of each column.

Illustrations

Embroidery-style illustrations are labeled Illustration in their credit line. They set a scene, carry no evidence, never imitate a real manuscript, book page or object, and never show the face of a real teller or author. Historical tellers and writers appear only in public-domain portraits whose rights are recorded in the credit line.

Where the site stops

The site does not judge whether any religion is true and does not comment on present-day religious groups. It does not rule on which country a tale belongs to; it reports what the documents say. Where a story describes a herb, a cure or a rite, that is analyzed as part of the plot, not offered as something to try.

Errors can be sent to the address on the contact page; corrections are listed on the version history page, and licensing is explained on Reprint rights.