Ancient Web: D. L. Ashliman Found the Three Little Pigs in Folklore Across the World

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Everyone knows the three pigs, the wolf, and the house made of bricks. Folklorist D. L. Ashliman's web anthology asks a more interesting question: what else belongs to that family of stories?

Read the Three Little Pigs folktale collection.

The page identifies its editor as Ashliman and gives a copyright range of 1999–2008. Rather than offering a single children's adaptation, it assembles tales under Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 124. The index includes two English versions of the pigs' story, The Fox and the Pixies, The Fox and the Geese, two African-American stories recorded by Joel Chandler Harris, regional American material, and The Three Goslings from Italy.

This is an old-fashioned scholarly use of hypertext: a table of contents at the top, full texts below, source notes, and links that let readers compare the variations without hunting down a shelf of separate books.

When the wolf changes, the pattern survives

The familiar structure can survive substantial changes to its cast. In one tale, a fox stalks geese instead of a wolf stalking pigs. In another, the clever character is a pixy. The pieces to compare are the repeated threats, the attempts to create safety, and the eventual defeat of the predator.

Ashliman does not simply reproduce stories without provenance. His notes identify printed sources and, in some cases, explain where an account was published or collected. One Virginia story is attributed to a 1922 Journal of American Folklore collection; another is tied to a nineteenth-century publication tradition. Those references matter because folklore is often transmitted, revised, retold, and repackaged long before it reaches the web.

The site is part of Ashliman's larger Folktexts library, which gathers mythology, fairy tales, and folklore by topic and tale type. His biographical page identifies him as a University of Pittsburgh professor who retired in 2000 and continued his folklore research.

The page itself is simple HTML and long enough to invite actual reading. It also preserves a valuable early-web research habit: make primary texts available, name the sources, and show how related material connects.

The pigs' brick house is famous. The neighboring goose houses, fox tricks, and regional variants are why a comparative archive is worth building.

Explore Ashliman's tale-type 124 anthology.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.