Finnish scholars played a pivotal role in the development of folklore studies, particularly when it came to developing a method to understand the folktale. The method they developed inspired the creation of a folktale type index, an approach to organization to influenced archives internationally - quite a remarkable legacy!

Folklorists going back to the Brothers Grimm recognized that the vast body of folktales included stories that were repeating. Connections with similar stories in historic sources quickly became apparent. All folklore collector recognized that their storytellers - their informants - were not inventing these stories, but rather they were repeating what they had heard from other storytellers. It was a logical deduction, then, that there were traditional stories that were repeated over time and that diffused geographically. Going back to Jacob Grimm, there was intense interesting in discovering the first telling of each folktale - both to find the time and place of its origin, but also to find the outline of that first story, weeding out changes that had occurred during diffusion. The earliest folklorists were obsessed with this quest, but how to accomplish such a task became the burning question.

The Finnish folklorists took a leading role in developing a method to address this problem. Julius Krohn (1835–1888) wrote a treatise on methodology which became the Finnish Method. Because of his early death, his son Kaarle Krohn (1863–1933) amended and published his father's work, setting the stage for the development of the Finnish Historic-Geographic Method. This called for the collection of variants of a folktale and then the analysis of them, combined with consideration of expressions of the folktale found in historic sources. The impossible challenge in all of this was reaching beyond one's own culture and language. Similar folktales were being discovered in many different places, but to rely exclusively on whatever publications and translations might come one's way would mean that conducting international research would be extremely difficult. Enter the Finnish folklorist, Antti Aarne (1867–1925), who began the monumental task of creating a Tale Type Index, assigning numbers for each folktale that seemed to exist in the European repertoire. He was later assisted by the American folklorist, Stith Thompson (1885–1976), arriving at an Index with over one thousand tale types with representation from India to Ireland.

The Tale Type Index (much later there would be a similar index for legends) opened the door for each nation's folklore archive to organize its material according to an internationally agreed-upon system. It would then be possible to write to each archive to request copies of variants, and if archivists were generous, for translations of those variants. This, then, became the grounding for an international community of researchers each pursing a common goal of finding the original telling of a folktale, complete with a description of how it changed over time and space. Folklorists typically began their career by writing a monograph on one of the one thousand folktales, for the goal was to have a monograph on each of the tale types. The Folklore Fellows was established in Helsinki to facilitate international research and to publish these monographs - it still does this to this day.

Finland assumed this leadership role for peculiar reasons, I suppose it is fair to say. The best folklore archives are often in places where people sought to establish their own national identity. Germany (with scattered states often under the influence of foreign powers) Iceland and Norway (seeking independence from Denmark), Ireland (the UK), and finally Finland, seeking to shape its identity and government away from Sweden and Russia respectively. Scandinavia in general became a powerhouse of folklore studies, taking the baton from the Brothers Grimm, so the research was fomenting there at an early period. The Krohns benefited from the advanced Swedish research that was occurring in their midst - research that often extended into Finland itself. This combined with a Finnish desire for independence to inspire all of the great work that made Finland the center of this early research.

The Finnish method has been assailed on several fronts. Carl Jung (1875-1961) sidestepped the question of tale types entirely by considering the universality of motifs (the elements of a folktale). This led to its own line of enquiry, but because it did not adapt well to a measured, analytical approach, folklorists generally do not follow that approach. Nevertheless, in the US in particular, one finds self-made folklorists who embrace Jung, but these individuals tend to be apart from the discipline, and their work is not normally published in the standard academic folklore journals.

Vladímir Propp (1895-1970) also attacked the Finnish Method, insisting that tale types were an illusion and that what we are seeing is a core structure upon which motifs were hung. Because the motifs were finite in number and the structure commanded the nature of the stories, the repetition of similar stories were inevitable. As a Soviet folklorist, Propp wanted to depict every storyteller (every proletariat) as being an equal artist, able to create his/her own folktales. It was abhorrent to conceive of an ancient inheritance of a folktale type, where some long-ago, possibly-court storyteller invented a story, and then all the subsequent peasants merely repeated it. One of the problems with this conclusion is that folklorists who worked with storytellers universally found that the storytellers were repeating stories and that they could not invent new ones. Propp's observation of a core structure is extremely useful, but that does not support the conclusion that stories were repeatedly re-invented.

Many folklorists (myself included) have found a problem with the goal of the Finnish method to find the original telling, the "ur" form of each folktale. While this is a wonderful, romantic quest, it seldom yields convincing results, and even when it does, it may not answer any important questions about the folklore. Much of the early folklore studies were influenced by Neo-Kantians who were wedded to the nineteenth-century Romanticism that encouraged the mind to explore literature and all sources and then find the inspiration to understand. My mentor Sven Liljeblad (1899-2000) belonged to a younger generation influenced by scientific positivism that shunned "inspiration" and the earlier romantic notions.

Sven was inspired by Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his meticulous work of gathering and collecting aspects of Native American culture. His emphasis was on the geography more than the history: geography was seen as scientifically approachable, while history was seen as inherently subjective and therefore romantic. Sven persuaded his mentor, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (1878-1952) to adopt an approach that emphasized the geography of the Finnish Historic-Geographic Method. This new Swedish variant on the method focused on what happened when oral narratives diffused. This placed equal value on all variants of a story without seeking to eliminate the mutations expressed in variants to understand the original "true" story. But Sven's approach also shunned history. My approach has been to attempt a reunification of the history part of the story to this interest in the Swedish question of diffusion and local adaptation. I believe Sven was too quick to abandon history (being so completely influenced by the early Positivists). All this means that Sven had - and I still have - enormous respect for the Finnish method and use its indexes whenever possible, but the questions we ask are different.

edit to make the role of Russia in Finnish history clear - thanks to the excellent input by /u/Jepekula