Mythic & Fairy Tale Motifs

Traditional tales are not endlessly unique inventions. They are recombinations of a surprisingly stable repertoire of story skeletons, character roles, narrative actions, images, tests, magical objects, taboos, transformations, and endings. Different classification systems are examining different levels of this same phenomenon.

These systems fit together remarkably well.

1. ATU: the great catalogue of recurring stories

Antti Aarne began the tale-type catalogue in 1910; Stith Thompson greatly expanded it, and Hans-Jörg Uther revised it into the modern Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index in 2004. Historically, its strongest coverage has been Europe and West Asia.

Its great divisions are:

The 300–749 Tales of Magic are the territory we normally mean when we imagine a fairy tale: supernatural opponents, enchanted spouses and relatives, impossible tasks, supernatural helpers, magical objects, extraordinary powers, transformations and journeys into strange kingdoms.

What makes ATU illuminating is that Cinderella is not fundamentally one story. It is one manifestation of ATU 510A, the persecuted heroine.

East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Cupid and Psyche, and many animal-bridegroom tales belong to the enormous family ATU 425, The Search for the Lost Husband. Folklore Database

2. The great recurring story-patterns

There are hundreds of ATU types, but beneath them you can discern a smaller number of master story engines:

ATU 300 is the Dragon-Slayer; ATU 313 the Magic Flight; ATU 425 the Search for the Lost Husband; ATU 500 the supernatural helper whose name must be discovered; ATU 510A Cinderella; ATU 551 concerns the Water of Life; ATU 709 is the Snow White family. The ATU catalogue therefore becomes less a miscellaneous catalogue than a map of recurring narrative transformations.

3. Thompson: the enormous vocabulary of motifs

Stith Thompson went smaller. Instead of asking "What story is this?" he asked: What reusable elements compose stories?

His Motif-Index of Folk-Literature arranges them under great categories: Mythological Motifs; Animals; Taboos; Magic; the Dead; Marvels; Ogres; Tests; the Wise and Foolish; Deceptions; Reversals of Fortune; Ordaining the Future; Chance and Fate; Society; Rewards and Punishments; Captives and Fugitives; Unnatural Cruelty; Sex; the Nature of Life; Religion; Traits of Character; Humor; and miscellaneous motifs. Folklore Database

This is where the sheer recurring vocabulary of folklore becomes visible:

the enchanted sword, three brothers, the helpful animal, the talking horse, the magic ring, the invisible cloak, the forbidden chamber, the external soul hidden in an egg, the giant who cannot be killed normally, the grateful dead man, the mysterious old beggar, the youngest daughter, the wicked stepmother, the changeling, the abandoned infant, the prophecy, the miraculous conception, the birthmark, the recognition ring, the riddle contest, the impossible task, the three wishes, the seven-year enchantment, the animal bride or bridegroom, the magic tree, the talking corpse, the bridge guardian, the severed head that continues speaking, the treasure beneath the earth, the journey to the land of the dead, the waters of healing, the castle that appears and disappears.

A tale type is therefore something like a molecule; motifs are its atoms. The same motif can wander through completely different tale-types, myths, saints' legends, romances and epics. Thompson's index explicitly includes material from myths, legends, ballads, medieval romances and other narrative traditions, not merely children's fairy tales. Folklore Database

This is one reason the boundaries between myth, legend, fairy tale and romance become porous when you study them comparatively.

4. Propp discovered something even deeper: the grammar underneath the motifs

Vladimir Propp studied 100 Russian wonder tales and realized that endlessly different characters and objects were often performing the same narrative function.

A king may give the hero a sword. A witch may give him a horse. A dead man may give him a ring. A fox may reveal a secret path.

To Propp, all four are variants of something deeper:

the hero receives magical assistance.

Likewise a dragon kidnapping a princess, a witch stealing a child, a king lacking the Water of Life, or a family suffering famine can all occupy the structural position of villainy/lack: something is wrong with the world and must be repaired.

Propp identified 31 possible functions. Not every tale contains all 31, but when they appear they tend to occur in a characteristic order. University Scholars Programme

They become much easier to understand if grouped into five movements:

That is what we instinctively recognize as the grammar of the fairy tale.

Propp also reduced the immense population of fairy tales to seven fundamental roles: Hero, Villain, Donor, Helper, Dispatcher, Sought-for Person/Prize (traditionally "Princess and her Father"), and False Hero. One character can occupy several roles, and one role can be divided among several characters. Wikipedia

5. Olrik: why folktales actually feel like folktales

Axel Olrik approached traditional oral narrative from yet another angle. His "Epic Laws" describe tendencies of oral storytelling itself.

Among the most revealing are simplicity; few principal characters; two actors dominating a scene; a single narrative strand; strong opposition between characters; repetition; repetition in threes; emphasis upon the final member of a sequence; and movement from a quiet beginning toward extraordinary action before settling again into a definite conclusion. Wikipedia

Hence:

Three brothers.

Three nights.

Three riddles.

Three gifts.

Three attempts.

The first fails. The second fails. The third succeeds.

The wicked sister and the good sister.

The beautiful princess and hideous witch.

The tiny hero and enormous giant.

The poor youngest son and wealthy elder brothers.

Oral narrative naturally favors contrast, repetition, pattern, symmetry and memorable number.

6. The cultural traditions

What becomes especially interesting is that the underlying grammar travels, while each culture dresses it in its own symbolic language. Folklore scholarship explicitly studies this traffic between oral traditions, literary traditions and neighboring cultures rather than treating national traditions as sealed boxes. AdW Göttingen

Persian literary and oral traditions absorbed, transmitted and transformed Iranian, Arabic, Indic and Greek materials; Encyclopaedia Iranica explicitly traces such exchanges. Encyclopaedia Iranica

Jewish folklore is inherently transregional: Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Middle Eastern, Persian, Iraqi, North African and other Jewish communities carried shared Jewish characters and religious motifs into conversation with the local storytelling traditions around them. The Israel Folktale Archives now preserves more than 25,000 narratives from dozens of communities. Haifa University Library

7. The deepest synthesis

If wecollapse ATU, Thompson, Propp and Olrik together, the central wonder-tale pattern looks something like this:

Order → Lack → Prohibition → Transgression → Exile/Departure → Threshold → Otherworld → Encounter with Donor → Test → Magical Gift → Three Trials → Descent/Confrontation → Victory → Pursuit → Return → Hidden Identity → Recognition → Exposure of Falsehood → Restoration → Marriage/Kingship.

Not every tale contains all of it. But enormous numbers of stories contain portions of this sequence.

And beneath the sequence are a few perennial oppositions:

home / wilderness

known world / Otherworld

kingdom / wasteland

human / monster

elder / youngest

true heir / false claimant

poverty / kingship

appearance / true identity

prohibition / transgression

death / rebirth

exile / return

lack / restoration