Walter Oskar Hackman (27 July 1868 in Vyborg – 2 August 1922 in Helsinki) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish folklorist.
[1] Due to his German roots - the Hackman family came from Bremen, from where his great-grandfather Johan Friedrich Hackman the Elder (1755-1807) emigrated to Vyborg in 1777[2] – he received his schooling in Leipzig.
In 1887 he matriculated at the University of Helsinki, studied there with Kaarle Krohn and received his doctorate in 1904 on The Polyphemus Legend in folk tradition.
[3] His main interest, however, was the Finnish-Swedish fairy tales: in 1911 he published his catalog of fairy tales of the Finnish Swedes and in 1917 and 1920 a volume Finlands svenska folkdiktning, in which he gave an overview of the fairy tale variants recorded by the Finnish Swedes, which he divided into 404 narrative types , with some deviations from Aarne's system.
A catalog of types of mythical sagas begun by Hackman remained unfinished.