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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 ▲ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| H22 | Sense of smell in animals. | Large game animals did not have a sense of smell. They acquired it and began to flee from hunters after someone created olfactory organs for them or gave them a strong smell to smell. Cf. motif H22A. | 14 | 22 |
| H7g In H7 family | Life as a candle. | A person sees many burning candles or lamps. When one of them burns out, someone dies. | 19 | 22 |
| I22e In I22 family | Moving objects on the path of the dead. | The deceased, travelling to the afterlife, must pass by colliding rocks or other moving obstacles. | 13 | 22 |
| I25D In I25 family | Lubricate the gate with grease. | On the way to a dangerous character, a person greases the gate (door hinges) with grease or oil. On the way back, the grateful gate refuses to hold him back. | 14 | 22 |
| I35a2 In I35 family | Thunder – rolling stones, vessels. | Thunder is heard when stones or large vessels are rolled, dragged or overturned in the sky. | 20 | 22 |
| I41b1 In I41 family | The rainbow swallows fish. | The rainbow drinks, swallowing fish, people, etc. along with the water. Sometimes this fish falls from the sky to the ground. | 16 | 22 |
| I81a In I81 family | Chthonic crab. | The giant crab causes earthquakes or floods, closes or can close the water outlet. | 14 | 22 |
| K10f In K10 family | The chicks turn into ordinary eagles. | The character turns the children of a flying monster into ordinary eagles or owls. | 22 | 22 |
| K110 | Reflection of the golden sword. | The character is asked to retrieve treasure from the bottom of a pond. He does not understand that he is only seeing a reflection and that the treasure is located above. | 27 | 22 |
| K117d In K117 family | Two in bed with the princess, ATU 850. | The princess, lying between two suitors, must choose blindly the one she likes best. The suitor of low birth arranges things so that his noble rival emits a foul odour (while he himself emits a pleasant fragrance). The princess turns to him. | 40 | 22 |
| K120a2 In K120 family | Not by her mother, but by her mother-in-law. | Family members want to marry their daughter off to a man who is unacceptable to her (usually they want to marry her off to her own brother). The girl refuses to address her father, mother, etc. as close relatives, but calls them in-laws (mother-in-law, sister-in-law, etc.) or enemies; or the relatives themselves demand that the girl address them as in-laws. | 23 | 22 |
| K27c In K27 family | Knives and spikes. | Test: to remain alive when coming into contact with piercing, cutting, or crushing instruments. See motif K27. | 31 | 22 |
| 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 |
| K27l1 In K27 family | Frozen in ice. | Voluntarily subjecting himself to trials, the character allows himself to be frozen in ice and cannot free himself. | 12 | 22 |
| K27n3c In K27 family | The one who gives tasks – a zoomorphic creature. | A character who gives the hero difficult tasks or subjects him to trials is associated with a land or water animal or a fish. See motif K27. | 48 | 22 |
| k34a In k34 family | A rival lures a woman onto a swing. | A rival puts a woman on a swing to get rid of her by throwing her into the water. She (almost) drowns or temporarily loses her human form, but manages to return to the world of humans. | 20 | 22 |
| K38b4 In K38 family | The serpent emerges from the water. | The nest of a mighty bird is located on a tree in the middle (at the edge) of a pond, from where a snake (monster) emerges, threatening the chicks. | 13 | 22 |
| K76c In K76 family | Pumpkin child. | The son (rarely – daughter) or foster child of a married couple emerges from a pumpkin (rarely: watermelon, nut) or is found inside it. | 20 | 22 |
| K81a In K81 family | Bezrucha in the prince's garden. | A girl with severed hands comes to a fruit tree (garden) to find food. Seeing her there, the prince takes her as his wife. | 19 | 22 |
| L100f1 In L100 family | Lover fleeing from her husband, ATU 1725. | A worker (the young son of the master) arranges things so that the food prepared by the mistress for her lover, who is working in the field, goes to the master, and when the master goes to the man, not knowing that he is his wife's lover, the man thinks that the husband is coming to kill him and flees. | 45 | 22 |
| L102 | Escape from an animal husband. | A girl or woman (for various reasons, jokingly or seriously) calls an animal or animal remains her husband, or steps on bones and addresses them. The animal (comes to life and) carries her away. Her human husband, parents or brother come for her, and they flee; usually the animal husband pursues them, but stops the chase or dies. | 18 | 22 |
| L27a In L27 family | One is eaten, the other runs away. | Sisters or a brother and sister find themselves in the same house with an antagonist, whose cannibalism they only suspect or do not know about at all. Trying to hide his actions, the cannibal eats one of the children. The other child or children run away, and the antagonist pursues them. Usually the antagonist is female, and if male, he has no sexual interest in his victims. (In the Central Andes, the plot may have been borrowed in the 19th century from Chinese migrants; see motifs J47, M21). | 11 | 22 |
| L33b In L33 family | The trickster provokes a stone. | The character challenges someone who, at first glance, is unable to move (a stump, a boulder, fire) to race or roll over it. The challenged party sets off, crushes or burns the character, or runs away with their property. | 18 | 22 |
| L42i In L42 family | Sister sets out to rescue her brother (geese-swans), ATU 480A*. | Creatures from another world carry off a little boy. His sister takes him and safely escapes from their pursuers. Usually the boy has two or three sisters, and only the youngest succeeds. | 15 | 22 |
| L65b4 In L65 family | Tooth-axe. | The character pulls out his tooth to use it as a weapon or tool (often an axe). | 18 | 22 |
| L78 | Toad-jaguar. | In the images, the character has the features of a jaguar and a toad; the toad/frog turns into a jaguar; the toad/frog is the mother or wife of the jaguar. | 21 | 22 |
| L79 | Two wives: a girl and a monster. | The girl marries a powerful, benevolent character; his first wife is a monster; he kills her or is satisfied that she has been killed by his new wife. | 16 | 22 |
| L80 | Drop of blood. | A demonic creature or animal is killed, but comes back to life or can come back to life if even a small piece of its flesh or blood is left behind, unnoticed. | 16 | 22 |
| M153a In M153 family | The Washed Pig, ATU 122G(1). | A predator is about to eat a human or herbivorous animal. The intended victim asks to be allowed to wash first, and as a result is saved. (Among the Transylvanian Saxons, this involves being baptised with water). | 23 | 22 |
| M181a In M181 family | Fire at sunset. | The character believes that unattainable natural objects are accessible cultural objects. Usually agrees to go after fire upon seeing a red sunset, fireflies, etc. | 17 | 22 |
| m187d In m187 family | Race: turtle (toad) - participant. | Participating in a race, the turtle or frog (toad) defeats its faster opponent. See motif M183. | 45 | 22 |
| M191b In M191 family | The snake will not forget its severed tail, ATU 285A. | A man does good (does no harm) to a snake (fish, lion) and benefits from it. His son (less often someone else or himself) wounds the snake (usually cuts off its tail) and, if it is his son, dies from the bite. The snake refuses to continue its relationship with the man, and neither of them will forget their loss. | 35 | 22 |
| M198a4 In M198 family | Who is nobler? ATU 976. | Those who listened to the story must answer who they liked more: the husband who let his wife go to another man after the wedding, the robber who did not harm her, or the man who immediately sent her back to her husband. | 18 | 22 |
| M198b4 In M198 family | The imaginary fortune teller: names of thieves. | The fake fortune teller, expecting to be exposed, utters words that reflect his state of mind. The thieves standing nearby perceive some of the words as their names, believe that the fortune teller has found out about them, and ask him not to reveal them. | 19 | 22 |
| M29z3 In M29 family | Gypsy - opponent and loser | The Gipsy (more often a female than a male) is an enemy overcome by the hero (heroine) or (rare) a weak failure | 25 | 22 |
| M39e1a In M39 family | Mice ate iron, ATU 1592, 1592A | The character claims that the mice ate iron (gold). | 27 | 22 |
| M75b4 In M75 family | The Trojan horse: getting a woman | To master a woman, the hero hides inside the hollow figure of a horse (bull, deer) or in an animal carcass. The character guarding the woman takes her to her. The hero gets outside and becomes a woman's lover. Or a woman hides inside the figure of a horse, which is taken to the man's chambers. | 35 | 22 |
| N6 | Whip a horse | horse tells the rider to whip it so hard that his blood splashes, his skin peels off, the meat is cut to the bone, etc. The rider follows these instructions. | 15 | 22 |
| A47 | The sun is born from an egg. | The sun is born or emerges from an egg. | 17 | 23 |
| B116a In B116 family | Knowledge is stored in the stomach. | A person or animal eats a sacred book or its remains. During the ritual, this knowledge is actualised in oral speech, in the sounds of a musical instrument made from part of an animal's body, or in parts of an animal's body used for divination. | 17 | 23 |
| B27b In B27 family | Transformation into stars. | The characters ponder what they should transform into and decide to become a celestial object. | 13 | 23 |
| B2f In B2 family | Difficult funerals. | The character cannot bury the deceased, not knowing how to do it or not finding a place for burial. | 13 | 23 |
| B36c In B36 family | Fat animals. | Animals receive meat and fat rendered from a certain creature or obtained in some other way. Some received a lot, others remained thin. | 21 | 23 |
| B44c In B44 family | To be warm and light. | The characters argue about whether there should be darkness or light, cold or warmth on earth. See motif B44. | 22 | 23 |
| B51 | The Mosquito and Thunder. | Thanks to a deliberate lie, Thunder did not learn from the bloodsucking insect that it had drunk human blood. | 21 | 23 |
| B53 | Creatures and objects made from severed genitals. | The character's enormous genitals are cut off (usually cut into pieces), thrown away, and transformed into snakes or other creatures or objects. | 22 | 23 |
| B7a In B7 family | Spit-out water. | Someone possesses water or a drink. Another character swallows what is hidden, runs away and spits out what is hidden, making the water or drink available to everyone. | 16 | 23 |
| C38 | People will appear soon. | Characters from the time of creation say that real people will appear soon, so we must do this and that. | 19 | 23 |
| D4q In D4 family | The fly obtains fire. | The fly rubs its legs together and produces fire. | 10 | 23 |
| E7 | Stuck in a hole in the sky. | The path from one part of the world to another passes through a narrow opening. The character gets stuck in the opening, permanently severing the connection between the worlds. | 23 | 23 |
Tradition and narrative counts are the stored catalogue totals for each entry.