Anne, Sister Anne, Do You See Nobody Coming?

I've developed a bit of an interest in fairy/folk tales as of late.  More specifically, I'm rather intrigued by the analysis and classification of these tales.

Basically, there appears to be two methods.  The first is based off of the work of Vladimir Propp—a Russian scholar who broke down Russian folktales into 31 irreducible parts (with each part being sub-defined into different variations on the theme).  The idea behind it being that although not every part will be present in every tale, every tale can be broken down into a number of the given 31 parts.  This results in a tale being able to be described using a string of letters (both Latin and Greek) and numbers, which outlines its basic plot structure.  For example, one online analysis describes the Grimm brothers' Bearskin as being of type αa⁵D^lE¹MF^lTa⁵BKNToQW^*.  I'd try to explain what this means, but the subsections don't quite match up with the detailed breakdown of parts given before. (Namely: To, which appears to represent some variation of transformation (T) doesn't appear in the list of possible Ts (nor does o appear anywhere as its own element), and W^* is listed in the wedding (W) variants as "protagonist(s) ascends throne"—something that never happens in Bearksin.)

The other form of analysis is the Aarne-Thompson (AT) numbering system, which has been recently revised as the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) system. (Anyone with €100+ to spare can feel free to buy me a copy of it.)  The AT system classifies the tales based on their basic thematic elements, and records if they appear to be variations of other themes.  (For example: Hansel & Gretel is of type 327A, where 327 represents tales of the type "the children and the ogre". But it is also considered to contain type 1121: "burning the ogre's wife in his own oven".)  That said, the system is apparently a tad cumbersome.  Compare Fitcher's Bird and Blue Beard; both are extremely similar in theme (villain forbids character(s) from entering a room, and threatens them with death if he discovers that they have disobeyed him), but are classified as two separate types (311 for Fitcher's Bird, and 312 for Bluebeard), ostensibly because in one (311) the rescuer is female, but in the other (312) the rescuer is male.  (Although, not having a full understanding of the AT system, I am relying off of what I have heard from other sources.)  (This site contains a list of a large number of the AT motifs, and their corresponding number.)

Anyways, enough rambling.  Here's an automated fairy tale generator that produces them based off of which of Propp's elements are selected for inclusion.