Storysearch is a search engine of about 50,000 patterns or "Motifs" from within around 1.5 million moments in folklore, myth and legend. The stories are from all over the world over, but are arranged by common ideas which allows us to see connections between cultures. While you cannot read the stories just yet, we are working on a method to collect them, and link them to make it easier for everyone to have access to them.
To try it out, please enter a story item into the search form above. Our suggestions are things like: Gold, Water, Hero, Trickster, Father, Lover, Tabu, etc. From there, you can use a sub search to narrow down your results.
Enjoy!
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This website is a search engine of almost 50,000 patterns within stories world over called "Motifs" and several projects fueled by this search engine.
The work comes from a folklorist named Stith Thompson who spent his life reading and cataloging these stories which he published as the Motif Index of Folklore and Literature. You can read more about his work here: Wikipedia page for Stith Thompson
While we have Mr. Thompson's motifs, we have yet to track down all of the stories he read, which is our ultimate goal. We then will provide the stories for all to read, explore and see the connections and commonalities between these stories which we hope to further understandings between cultures and deeper into ourselves.
Of course, since there are a current total of 46,248 motifs, we've estimated there to be as many as 151,822,000 stories referenced. We're working to collect all of them now and to create a way to cross link the ones in the public domain for all of you to read. If you'd like to help, please let us know via the contact tab shown above.
For now, we are working to build a crowdsourcing application to help us collect, organize these stories along with tagging the motifs within them.
Until then, please use the following FAQ.