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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.
All motif categories
| Ref | Title | Summary | Traditions | Narratives ▲ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E36a In E36 family | Growing nails. | Nails grow constantly, or the human body is covered with a hard crust only on the nails, because only they were washed with living water. | 2 | 3 |
| E42 | The appearance of female breasts. | Women have two breasts because the original breast was cut in half. | 2 | 3 |
| F100b In F100 family | A minor transgression by a chaste woman. | Thanks to her virtue, a woman is capable of doing what others cannot, but she succeeds only after she remembers a minor transgression she committed in her youth. | 3 | 3 |
| F49B In F49 family | In a distant land, they do not know how to give birth. | The hero comes to a people whose women do not know how to give birth. See motif F49. | 5 | 3 |
| F54b In F54 family | Stuck feathers. | A young man or boy copulates with his mother or sister. This becomes known from the remains of paint or feathers with which he was covered during sexual intercourse. | 3 | 3 |
| F54c In F54 family | Recognised by nail marks. | A husband sees someone's fingernail marks on his wife's body and gathers the men to find out who left the marks. | 3 | 3 |
| F72 | Imitation of rape. | A woman asks a man to tie her up before intercourse so that it looks like she is being raped. | 2 | 3 |
| F77C In F77 family | Penis-rope. | The character climbs a tree or descends a huge penis, which turns into a rope or vine. | 3 | 3 |
| F93a In F93 family | The talking penis and the mother-in-law. | A man's penis begins to talk incessantly, falling silent only after his mother-in-law takes it in her hand. | 6 | 3 |
| F9f2 In F9 family | The cobra's hood in the wife's handbag. | A woman places a piece of flesh from her slain snake lover in her handbag and poses a corresponding riddle. If her husband fails to guess the answer, she has the right to kill him. The husband accidentally learns the secret and kills his wife. | 3 | 3 |
| H36g2 In H36 family | The beetle distorts the message. | When a character, who later became a dung beetle, was ordered to convey certain instructions to people, he distorted them. | 3 | 3 |
| I140 | Moses' rod. | The staff thrown to the ground turns into a living snake. | 3 | 3 |
| I27d In I27 family | The mouth of a black dog. | There is a certain black or red dog that (is associated with objects in the night sky and) negatively affects people's lives. | 3 | 3 |
| I28a In I28 family | Animals cause earthquakes. | Large animals that are hunted go underground and cause earthquakes. | 3 | 3 |
| I35b1 In I35 family | Icy sky. | The sky is made of ice. | 5 | 3 |
| I4F In I4 family | Thunder – two combatants. | The hero and his opponent engage in single combat and are still fighting in the sky. This is thunder. | 2 | 3 |
| i50a1 In i50 family | The dog's severed legs. | The character sequentially tears off the dog's legs, but the dog continues to do what it considers necessary. | 3 | 3 |
| I50c In I50 family | Sharabha (animal with legs on its back). | Describes a hoofed animal with a second set of legs on its back that runs either normally or upside down. This makes it tireless. | 4 | 3 |
| I55b In I55 family | The Sun Deer. | The hero chases a deer or elk carrying the sun. | 2 | 3 |
| I82j In I82 family | Venus – husband of the Moon. | Venus-man or another star is the husband of the Moon-woman. See motif I82a. | 3 | 3 |
| J1 | Avenging heroes (all variants). | The characters avenge the death of their father, mother or other relatives who are older than them by a generation (less often by two generations). | 1 | 3 |
| j23f In j23 family | Temporarily incarnated in a human being. | Something inanimate incarnates in a human being to solve people's problems and then returns to its original state. | 3 | 3 |
| J6a In J6 family | Mother eaten, daughter saved. | A pregnant woman with a young daughter fall into the hands of cannibals. The cannibals find and eat the woman, but her daughter and the baby in her womb are saved. | 3 | 3 |
| K113b In K113 family | The Frog Princess – Mistress of the Storm. | The younger prince marries a frog. She must first arrive at his parents' house. A thunderstorm begins. Rain, lightning, and thunder signify that the prince's wife is washing, dressing, travelling, etc. | 5 | 3 |
| K167b In K167 family | What is a lamb in the womb of a sheep? | A boy is able to determine the sex and colour of a young animal in the womb. | 3 | 3 |
| K52b In K52 family | Broken axe. | The hero comes to capture the daughter of a supernatural creature. He sees a slave breaking an axe (adze, wedge). The hero repairs the axe, and the slave helps him in return. See motif K52. | 6 | 3 |
| K58b In K58 family | Turn of the watercourse: failure. | The character builds a canal, bridge, or dam. For some reason, the work cannot be completed as planned. | 9 | 3 |
| K73b7 In K73 family | The hero kills the enemy of his enchanted wife. | The hero saves the magical wife from her enemy at a time when both the future wife and the enemy have zoomorphic appearances. Later, the rescued woman becomes a woman. | 3 | 3 |
| L31b In L31 family | The reptile crawls into the water. | Upon discovering a reptile on land, people touch it or sit on it, stick to it, and it crawls away with them into the water. See motif L31. | 17 | 3 |
| L85e In L85 family | Temporarily splits in two. | The character is temporarily split vertically into two halves and then rejoined. | 2 | 3 |
| L90d In L90 family | Lips nailed to the sky and the earth. | The hero attaches the upper lip (jaw) of the monster to the sky, and the lower lip to the earth. | 4 | 3 |
| L94d In L94 family | The tale with a tail. | A demonic character accuses a man of stepping on (tearing off) the tail of a fairy tale. Cf. motif K100E, "Dangerous Fairy Tales". | 3 | 3 |
| M109d In M109 family | Seized by the tail by a sea creature. | A zoomorphic character dips his tongue or tail into the water. An octopus or shell grabs it and holds it tight, so that the character drowns during high tide. | 3 | 3 |
| M136e In M136 family | Should the bride be shortened? | Instead of asking a person to bend down in front of a low lintel, others suggest cutting off his head or legs. | 3 | 3 |
| M157a7 In M157 family | Stolen children. | A zoomorphic character took the children of a character of another animal species and claims that they are his own children. | 3 | 3 |
| M162C In M162 family | The removed skin is eaten. | The fox persuades the bear to remove his skin, eats it, and the bear dies. | 2 | 3 |
| M183a In M183 family | Who will eat more: one against many. | Two people argue about who will eat or drink more. One of them is constantly replaced by his relatives, his opponent does not notice the substitution and loses. | 4 | 3 |
| M29S In M29 family | Trickster - Crane | See the motives in square brackets. | 3 | 3 |
| M39a2e In M39 family | Forgotten name | Forgetting his name, a fool remembers it when he accidentally hears a word. | 4 | 3 |
| M5d In M5 family | Squirrel and fish | The squirrel and the creeping fish are smart and get medicines for each other | 5 | 3 |
| M74e In M74 family | Divides by biting off piece by piece | Two characters ask the third to share something edible between them. He bites off a little bit from each of the halves, because one or the other is slightly larger. As a result, it eats everything. | 3 | 3 |
| N33A In N33 family | Trampled into the ground | The character's opponents trample him into the ground. | 2 | 3 |
| N39 | Three-fold twisted rope | The image of a three-ply rope is used to describe the invincibility of two close-knit friends | 3 | 3 |
| A19D In A19 family | One carries the Sun, the other the Moon. | Two characters carry the luminaries across the sky – one carries the sun, the other the moon. | 4 | 4 |
| A22d In A22 family | The burned person turns into a constellation. | The burned character turns into a constellation or a dark spot on the Milky Way. | 4 | 4 |
| A48 | The moon obtained and lost. | A character brings the moon from another world and uses it as a lamp. Another character drops the moon, and it rises into the sky and remains there. | 5 | 4 |
| B119 | The husband of a magical wife turns into a rooster. | A woman of non-human nature agrees to live with a man, but leaves him upon learning of his real or imagined infidelity. | 3 | 4 |
| B42a In B42 family | Blood or fat sprinkled on the ground. | Hunters chase a bear across the sky and kill it in August-October. The bear's blood or fat falls to the ground in the form of dew or colours the foliage red. See motif B42. | 6 | 4 |
| B48d In B48 family | Pike swallows people. | People or objects swallowed by a pike become part of its body (bones in its head, liver). | 3 | 4 |
| B57a In B57 family | Red sunset – an indication of what has happened. | Seeing the reddened sky, the character understands that another's blood has been spilled, or that another has spilled red liquid. See motif B57. | 13 | 4 |
Tradition and narrative counts are the stored catalogue totals for each entry.