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Berezkin/Duvakin Catalogue of Motifs
English translation, enhancements and additional metadata by Jonathan Fielder-White
Source: Berezkin and Duvakin's Analytical Catalogue · Original catalogue (Russian)
About the catalogue and its sources
Unless otherwise stated, narrative and tradition data comes from Berezkin and Duvakin's Thematic classification and distribution of folklore and mythological motifs by area (Analytical catalogue).
Original Berezkin/Duvakin catalogue (Russian)
The English translation uses AI assistance alongside manual verification. Errors may occur; consult the original source when in doubt.
K - Adventures: Acts of heroes
| Ref | Title ▲ | Summary | Traditions | Narratives |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| K13a In K13 family | Severed leg: a person ascends to the sky. | The character's leg (rarely: both legs) is cut off, bitten off, torn off, or damaged. The character ascends to the sky: to the moon; becomes the moon; turns into a star or constellation; becomes the sun; blood flowing from the leg colours the sky. | 30 | 64 |
| K38f1 In K38 family | Severed tongues. | After killing a monster or animal, the hero cuts off and hides a part of its body, usually the tongue. (In most cases, the deceiver takes credit for the feat, after which the hero presents the hidden item, thus exposing the deceiver). | 57 | 104 |
| K107a2 In K107 family | Shepherdess instead of princess. | A nobleman (king) is forced to promise his daughter or son to a demon (monster, predatory beast). He tries to replace her or him with other girls or boys, but this does not work. | 12 | 21 |
| K27v In K27 family | Shooting a bird. | The character must hit the bird with an arrow or a stone. (Cf. motif K27M, where it is not the accuracy of the archer that is important, but the unusual appearance of the creature that needs to be caught). | 16 | 17 |
| K27v3 In K27 family | Shooting an arrow through a ring. | The character must hit a small ring with an arrow or shoot it through several rings. (The main materials were identified by Y.V. Vasilkov and presented in Vasilkov 2018). | 11 | 11 |
| K83 | Sick Father, ATU 550, 551. | To heal, rejuvenate or save one's father, father-in-law or sister, one must bring medicine (bring a doctor) from a distant country. The medicine is brought and the sick person recovers. | 111 | 146 |
| K80c4 In K80 family | Silent witnesses to crime, ATU 960, 960A. | In a deserted place, one person kills another. After some time, he is exposed thanks to facts and circumstances that do not seem important and do not directly tell about the crime (the victim's last words; objects or living beings that were or appeared at the scene of the murder). (All texts containing motifs K80c3 and K80c4 also contain the more general motif K80c). | 56 | 57 |
| K137 | Sister brings women to revive her brother. | The brother is killed, the sister, dressed in her brother's clothes and disguised as a young man, finds women who are able to revive the dead, puts her brother's clothes back on his body, and the women who have come revive him. Or the sister is killed, the brother lures women capable of reviving the dead, puts his clothes on his dead sister, the women think it is their husband, and revive the girl. | 16 | 15 |
| K84 | Sisters married to animals, ATU 552.1. | A young man gives his sisters to the first ones who come to woo them (less often, unknown creatures kidnap the sisters one by one, demanding a ransom for them). These are animals or demons, which then usually help him. | 79 | 121 |
| K67c In K67 family | Skin torn from the back. | The character agrees that under certain conditions another person may tear the skin from his back or cause him some other bodily harm. | 57 | 79 |
| K56a5a In K56 family | Skinning oneself to rejuvenate (ATU 877). | To become a young beauty, an old or unattractive woman asks to have her skin stripped off. Cf. motif H4. | 10 | 12 |
| K67f In K67 family | Slaughter the sheep that looks at you. | A fool or a rogue is instructed to slaughter the sheep (cow, bull) that looks at him, i.e. any one. He slaughters them all, because they all looked at him. | 14 | 15 |
| K16a In K16 family | Slipping, he drops the stuffed animal. | In an effort to show that he is a good hunter, a man regularly walks in front of a girl, pretending to carry prey. Once he slips, and the imaginary prey turns out to be a scarecrow stuffed with ashes or a bundle of termites. | 3 | 6 |
| K51b In K51 family | Smiles on the faces of the dead. | The bodies of the slain are left in such a position that it seems as if they are rejoicing – smiling, laughing, dancing. | 14 | 24 |
| K67g In K67 family | Smiling sheep. | Pretending to carry out his master's orders, the worker cuts off the animals' lips (to make them look like they are smiling). | 5 | 5 |
| K27b In K27 family | Smoking a pipe. | Test: smoke a huge or poisonous pipe or breathe in clouds of poisonous smoke. See motif K27. | 0 | 0 |
| K136c In K136 family | Sometimes alive, sometimes dead. | Upon leaving, the demon temporarily kills or puts the girl to sleep, and upon returning, revives her. | 19 | 25 |
| K76e In K76 family | Son (daughter) as a piglet. | The son (daughter) or foster child of a married couple is a pig. He marries a princess and turns into a handsome man (she marries a handsome man). | 19 | 23 |
| K14c In K14 family | Son mistaken for lover, ATU 910B. | Returning after a long absence and seeing signs that there is another man in the house, a man thinks that his wife has a lover, but does not rush to act and convinces himself that it is his own son or his wife's relative. | 61 | 64 |
| K76b In K76 family | Son-snake and husband-snake. | The son or foster son of snake spouses. He turns into a human. The snake is the princess's magical spouse, lost and returned. | 69 | 89 |
| K56e1 In K56 family | Song mentioning the days of the week. | A man sees dwarves (spirits, witches) having fun. Their song mentions the names of the days of the week. The man sings along, naming the days that the dwarves like. He is rewarded. (Usually, someone else tries to get the same reward, but names the wrong days of the week and is punished). | 17 | 26 |
| K14e In K14 family | Sons think their father is rich, ATU 982. | The sons do not care for their elderly father (rarely: the daughter-in-law does not care for her mother-in-law). He pretends to be hiding something. The sons believe that these are valuables that their father will leave them, and they begin to care for him. | 22 | 15 |
| K27hh In K27 family | Sorting grain, Th H1091. | The character is tasked with quickly separating small particles of different types (usually seeds of different plant species) mixed together in a single vessel, or counting the number of grains, or gathering scattered or already sown grain. | 139 | 183 |
| K27g4 In K27 family | Sow, reap and bake bread in one day. | The character must complete all field work in an unimaginably short time and present the products of the new harvest. | 47 | 68 |
| K115 | Spider web at the entrance, B523.1, ATU 967. | When a character hides in a shelter, a spider immediately weaves a web at the entrance. Enemies decide that no one has entered the cave or room for a long time and leave. | 50 | 41 |
| K65a In K65 family | Spirits fall from the sky. | After being thrown from a height or expelled, various creatures end up in different locations, acquiring corresponding functions and names. | 36 | 54 |
| K65 | Spirits of loci. | Having been cast out, discarded, or born of the first ancestors, creatures of a certain category acquire individuality, transforming into spirits who are the masters of various loci. | 40 | 61 |
| K19a In K19 family | Star Wife, T111.2.1. | A man marries a star woman. | 50 | 109 |
| K19b In K19 family | Star-man. | The star man takes an earthly woman as his wife. | 57 | 102 |
| K19g In K19 family | Stars differ in brightness and colour. | One star is an old man, the other is a young man; both stars differ in brightness or colour, but it is impossible to determine the age of the star-man by these characteristics (a dim star may be young and vice versa); usually two girls want to marry stars of different types (one bright, the other dim, one red, the other blue, etc.). See motif K19B. | 13 | 1 |
| K56b3 In K56 family | Stench instead of fragrance. | A man's intestinal gases become fragrant. An envious person tries to achieve the same result, but the outcome is the opposite. | 2 | 2 |
| K64b In K64 family | Sticky object. | The hero's opponent provokes him to touch an object that turns out to be sticky. The hero sticks to the object (see Miller 1890: 41). See motif K64. | 33 | 43 |
| K33f In K33 family | Stream of honey and stream of oil. | Sources of at least two valuable liquid edible products (honey, oil, etc.) are available or imagined. Cf. motif N34. | 24 | 41 |
| K60c In K60 family | Stropiva with the king, patient with the groom. | The stubborn wife of a worthy man goes on a date with a demon or a servant. He beats her, but she patiently endures her lover's beatings. | 21 | 25 |
| K117b In K117 family | Stuck Together, ATU 571, 571B. | The hero causes various people (and animals) to stick to each other (or to objects). | 69 | 58 |
| K15c In K15 family | Substituted clothing. | The owner of stone (ice) clothing kills people. By hiding or replacing his clothing, the hero kills him. | 5 | 6 |
| K15a In K15 family | Substituted weapon. | The hero secretly replaces the weapon or magical tool of a powerful character with a worthless fake. Traditions in which the replaced weapon belongs to Grom are highlighted in bold. | 38 | 50 |
| K8c1 In K8 family | Swallowed by a herbivore, then by a wolf. | A tiny man is first accidentally swallowed by a large herbivore, then carried off by a wolf that began to eat the carcass of this animal. | 28 | 36 |
| K78 | Swallowed, extracted from the little finger. | The cannibal swallows people. When he is killed, it turns out that they are not in his belly or that they are dead there. They are found alive not in the belly, but in the cannibal's finger, or there is a means of reviving them in the little finger, or the cannibal's finger must be cut or severed to find the people. | 37 | 53 |
| K78a In K78 family | Swallows and heals. | A demonic character swallows cripples and regurgitates them healthy and beautiful. | 16 | 24 |
| K93a In K93 family | Sword on the marriage bed, T351. | When lying down with a woman, a man places a sharp or pointed object between her and himself as a sign that he will abstain from sex during the night (sometimes the woman places the sword herself). | 52 | 69 |
| K38f3 In K38 family | Sword strike from a pit. | To kill the dragon, the hero digs a pit and hides in it. When the dragon crawls nearby or over the pit, the hero strikes it with a fatal blow of his sword. | 2 | 4 |
| K141 | Tamed mischievous sisters. | Supernatural women harm people. The hero tames them and usually takes them as wives. | 18 | 23 |
| K27g1 In K27 family | Task: clean out the stable. | The character must quickly clean the stable or barn of the manure that has accumulated there over a long period of time. | 15 | 22 |
| K27 | Tasks and competitions. | The character receives tasks that are deadly dangerous or can only be accomplished with supernatural abilities or helpers; the hero completes the tasks and/or miraculously survives. The confrontation between the characters unfolds as a game or competition in which the loser loses their life or status. | 477 | 1424 |
| K27n In K27 family | Tasks of relatives, H310, H331. | A young man must complete difficult tasks or win a competition in order to obtain permission to marry. The person giving the tasks is indicated in square brackets. See motif K27. | 373 | 325 |
| K97 | Tested fear, ATU 537. | A man prepares to kill a large bird, but does not kill it. When the bird later carries him, it pretends to leave him on a rock or throw him down. In doing so, it makes it clear how frightened it was. Either the bird first drops and catches the man, and later he makes her experience fear herself (the Volyn variant is slightly different). | 36 | 38 |
| K1j In K1 family | The abandoned returns faster than the abandoner. | The abandoned one turns into a bird and returns home faster than the one who abandoned him. | 9 | 10 |
| K43 | The abandoned survives and triumphs, S300. | People leave a boy, a girl, a sister and brother, a young woman or young spouses alone and leave, or drive them away. Those who are abandoned or expelled discover unusual abilities or helpers, obtaining blood and food. [Materials on European fairy tales are mostly not yet included] | 124 | 216 |
| K32h3 In K32 family | The antagonist is burned. | The antagonist is executed by being burned alive. (Episodes in which the burning of the character is not a punishment but a means of getting rid of him are not taken into account). | 51 | 122 |
Tradition and narrative counts are the stored catalogue totals for each entry.