Many would agree, Americas most important folklorist. The breadth and depth of his
contributions speak for themselves.
Thompson was born near Springfield, Kentucky. After attending Butler University and
the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he received his M.A. degree from the University
of California, Berkeley, in 1912, and his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1914.
His dissertation, written under George Lyman Kittredge, was titled European Borrowings
and Parallels in North American Indian Tales.
After teaching at several other universities, Thompson went to Indiana University in
Bloomington in 1922. Over the years, he taught courses in English language and literature, and he wrote and edited several widely used textbooks. As early as 1922 he
began offering courses in folklore—among the earliest such courses offered in the United
States.
Thompson’s efforts to promote folklore as a subject to be taught in colleges and
universities culminated in his establishing at Indiana the first Ph.D-granting program in
folklore in the country. The first doctorate in the program was awarded in 1953.
Thompson also supported and encouraged the establishment of folklore courses in
other colleges and universities, and often these were taught by his former students.
Hence, it can be said that one of his major contributions was that he was largely
responsible for establishing folklore on a firm academic footing in the United States.
A second major contribution lies in his own research. He published a number of
scholarly works that earned him recognition as one of the world’s greatest folktale
scholars. His fame rests largely on a group of indexes and surveys of the world’s
folktales, including European Tales among the North American Indians (1919), The
Types of the Folktale (1928, a translation and expansion of a work by the Finn Antti
Aarne), Tales of the North American Indians (1929), and The Motif-Index of FolkLiterature (1932–1936; rev. ed. 1955–1958). Other major works included The Folktale
(1946), Four Symposia on Folklore (1953), and One Hundred Favorite Folktales (1968).
Thompson’s final major contribution to folklore study is that he helped introduce
European folklore methods and goals into the United States. During the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, when British folklore scholarship was mainly concerned with
identifying supposed ancient survivals in contemporary folklore, and when American
folklore scholarship concentrated on ballads, few American folklorists knew of the
research being done with folktales in Finland, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. This
research emphasized the comparative analysis of single, widely known stories to discover
their original forms, places of origin, and paths of distribution. To facilitate this
comparative analysis, scholars encouraged extensive collecting, classification, and
archiving.
During the 1920s, through his travel and research, Thompson became acquainted with
Finnish and other European scholars and their work. Through his publications and
teaching, he helped make other American folklorists aware of European folktale research
and its ramifications. He had, therefore, a marked influence on the direction of American
folklore scholarship in the 20th century.
After he retired from teaching at Indiana University in 1955, Thompson continued his
research, among other things by revising and enlarging his earlier indexes. He also taught
at several other universities as a visiting professor.
Warren E.Roberts