Stith Thompson was an American scholar of folklore. He is the "Thompson" of the Aarne–Thompson classification system, which indexes certain folktales by their structure and assigns them AT numbers. He also developed an alpha-decimal motif-index system for cataloging individual motifs.
He studied at Harvard University from 1912 to 1914 under George Lyman Kittredge, writing the dissertation "European Borrowings and Parallels in North American Indian Tales," and earning his Ph.D.. This grew out of Kittredge's assignment, whose theme was investigating a certain tale called "The Blue Band", collected from the Chipewyan tribe in Saskatchewan may derive from contact with an analogous Scandinavian tale.
Post-graduate, tenure
Thompson was an English instructor at the University of Texas, Austin from 1914 to 1918, teaching composition. In 1921, he was appointed associate professor at the English Department of the Indiana University, which also had the responsibility of overseeing its composition program. He collected and archived traditional ballads, tales, proverbs, aphorisms, riddles, etc. The parallels and worldwide distributions of these could be studied using his motif cataloguing apparatus leading him to publish the first volume of his Motif-Index which was printed in 1955. He organized an informal quadrennial summertime "Institute of Folklore" beginning in 1942 which lasted beyond his retirement from tenure in 1955. In 1962, a permanent Institute of Folklore was established at Bloomington, with Richard Dorson serving as its administrator and chief editor of its journal publication. For nearly twenty years after his retirement, Thompson continued to work on his Motif-Index of Folk-Literature and The Types of the Folktale while also taking time to collaborate on projects with other folklorists such as Jonah Balys' The Oral Tales of India and Warren Roberts' Types of Indic Folktales. He even produced an anthology at the age of 83, One Hundred Favorite Folktales. In 1976, Thompson died of heart failure at his home in Columbus, Indiana. While Thompson wrote, co-wrote, or translated numerous books and articles on folklore, he became arguably best known for his work on the classification of motifs in folk tales. His six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature is considered the international key to traditional material.
Miscellanea
Thompson's 1954 article for The Filson Club History Quarterly entitled "The Beauchamp Family" continues in use by genealogists. In this article Thompson states that he is descended from a Costin Beauchamp from Somerset Co., Maryland which extends back to John Beauchamp one of the members of the Plymouth Company.
