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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 ▲ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| B38c In B38 family | The raven and the loon adorn each other. | The raven and the loon paint each other. | 20 | 28 |
| C26 | Guardian at the edge of a foreign world. | Monsters are ready to invade our world from another, but a powerful character protects people from the invasion. | 31 | 28 |
| D13A In D13 family | Obscene dance for the Sun. | To amuse the owner of fire or the Sun, others dance indecently, imitate copulation, display their genitals, or publicly relieve themselves. | 23 | 28 |
| F43a In F43 family | Women kill men. | In the community of the first ancestors, women kill, attempt to kill, or transform men. | 19 | 28 |
| F54e In F54 family | Unintentional killing of a father. | Not knowing who is in front of him, a young man kills his father. | 45 | 28 |
| F61 | A woman carries a trickster. | A male character pretends to be sick, weak, unconscious; a woman carries him on her back, he copulates or tries to copulate with her on the go. | 25 | 28 |
| G28 | Tree with fish. | The tree contains a fish in its trunk. | 19 | 28 |
| H21a In H21 family | Do not touch the big fish. | The fish are concentrated in a small container, from which the owner takes as many as he needs. Another character opens the container, breaking the rules, and the fish escape. | 13 | 28 |
| H49c In H49 family | The Innocently Slain Falcon, Th B221.2.2; ATU 178C. | A tame bird (rarely: a domestic animal) shows visible aggression towards its owner (usually a falcon knocks a bowl out of the hands of a thirsty man). The man kills the bird (animal) and then discovers that they saved him from death. | 22 | 28 |
| H53 | The wolf – lord of the dead. | The wolf participates in the creation of the earth or is the brother of the creator and/or conqueror of the demons of the underworld. He dies and/or is considered the first to die and/or becomes the lord of the land of the dead. | 13 | 28 |
| I113 | The piglet – the golden bristle, (ATU 530A). | A pig or boar made of gold or with golden bristles is a precious object. (In ATU, "a pig with golden bristles" is one of the possible miraculous objects; the presence of a corresponding number in regional indexes does not necessarily mean the presence of an image; only cases where the image is directly named are taken into account). | 15 | 28 |
| K35c3 In K35 family | The ship stopped. | For reasons that are not immediately clear, the ship stops in the middle of the sea (rarely: a horse stops in the middle of the road). | 23 | 28 |
| K66b In K66 family | Princesses given to companions. | Travelling from one place to another, the hero leaves one of his companions in each place (usually marrying them to the princesses he has received as a reward), and continues on his way. When he gets into trouble, his companions come to his aid. | 20 | 28 |
| K73c In K73 family | The girl in the bird's nest, (ATU 705A, 709A). | A girl finds herself in a bird's nest (usually the bird carries the baby girl away). The bird takes care of the girl, who grows up to be a beauty. | 27 | 28 |
| K85d In K85 family | A horse whose skin cannot be bitten through. | Covered with skins (coated with resin and sprinkled with sand, etc.), the mighty horse becomes invulnerable to the bites of other horses. | 19 | 28 |
| K93b4 In K93 family | A woman, a mare, and a dog give birth to boys. | When a woman gives birth to a son, at the same time a mare (dog, and/or other domestic animals) give birth to a boy. These boys grow up together and then set off on a journey. | 14 | 28 |
| L100c In L100 family | The chaste sorceress and seducers, D2006.1.1. | When a man comes to a beautiful woman who lives alone, she asks him to perform a trivial task (close the door, etc.) and uses magic to leave him in an awkward and uncomfortable position (holding the door handle, etc.) for the whole night. The next night, the same thing happens to another (rarely: the same) admirer. Each, ashamed, tells the others that he enjoyed it. | 23 | 28 |
| L106a In L106 family | Cut belly. | The antagonist makes formally justified but essentially unfair demands on the hero. The hero either fulfils them or is punished by the antagonist. Then the antagonist takes an object or animal belonging to the hero, but cannot return it and is punished equally or more severely. | 24 | 28 |
| l15h2 In l15 family | The soul of a character in a bird. | The object in which the character's life is contained is enclosed in another, which is enclosed in a third (and so on). The final repository of the soul is a bird (a chick, several birds or chicks). | 22 | 28 |
| L33f In L33 family | The nightjar breaks the rock. | A rock or boulder pursues a character. The character calls for help, and the nightjar splits the rock into pieces. | 17 | 28 |
| L6a In L6 family | Asks to be carried. | An unremarkable, weak-looking character asks a person to carry him or her on their back, and then refuses to get off. | 27 | 28 |
| L85c In L85 family | Polukurochka, B171.1, ATU 715. | A character with half a body – a hen, a chick. Sometimes it is only a name, and the character's appearance is more anthropomorphic. | 23 | 28 |
| L9c In L9 family | Sharp breast. | The character kills others with a sharp protrusion on his chest. | 13 | 28 |
| M135 | Two Rams and a Wolf, ATU 122K*. | Two ungulates – usually after the wolf agrees to share the meadow between them – gore the predator from both sides, killing or maiming it. | 35 | 28 |
| M14a In M14 family | Roasted alive. | To take revenge on his wife or her relatives for (allegedly) causing him offence, the husband roasts his wife alive. See motif M14. | 11 | 28 |
| M199a In M199 family | Squeezing brains out of the ground. | A man buried something soft and liquid in the ground, and when he stamped on it (shot an arrow into it) and the buried object splashed onto the surface, he said that he had squeezed the brain (innards) out of the earth. | 16 | 28 |
| M29X2 In M29 family | Trickster other creatures | See the motives in square brackets. | 41 | 28 |
| M38d6 In M38 family | Bursts with laughter | Several characters embody small objects and die one at a time. The last one left laughs and rejoices so much that he bursts with laughter (breaks his head, etc.). | 34 | 28 |
| M99a In M99 family | Bird bone house, ATU 984 | The character is going to build a house (tower, etc.) from the bones or feathers of birds. | 24 | 28 |
| N38 | Which key is better | The character asks others which key is better - lost and found or new. This refers to a forgotten and newfound marriage partner (less often a direct question is asked about this). | 19 | 28 |
| N8 | A storyteller instead of a core | fairy-tale text ends with a formula that says that the characters placed the narrator in a gun or gun and fired a shot, or he jumped onto the core himself and thus arrived at the place where the fairy tale was performed | 20 | 28 |
| A32c In A32 family | Dog and man on the moon. | The figures of a man and a dog are visible (or should have been visible) on the lunar disc. | 23 | 29 |
| B117 | Dog rights, ATU 200. | A document issued to animals (usually dogs) is lost through the fault of a cat (swallowed by a cat, burned, gnawed by mice). Since then, dogs and cats (usually also cats and mice) have been at enmity. | 30 | 29 |
| B87a In B87 family | Alcor – dog. | A dim star next to the second star of the handle of the Big Dipper (Tibetans: Little Dipper) Ursa Major – dog. | 24 | 29 |
| C23 | The tree blocks the sun. | The growth or fall of a giant tree determines the state of the sky and the celestial bodies in it (the tree blocks the light of the sun or threatens to destroy the sky, pulls the sun from the sky when it falls, etc.). | 21 | 29 |
| E25 | Arachne (spider weaver). | People learn the art of weaving from a spider or from a person who later becomes a spider; the spider makes fabrics for humans. | 28 | 29 |
| E9m In E9 family | The magical wife – the bear. | A man marries a bear (white or grizzly) that takes the form of a woman, or a woman who takes the form of a bear. | 16 | 29 |
| G13 | People ate rotten wood. | Before the advent of cultivated plants, people ate rotten or soft wood (ceiba – Ceiba L., balsa – Ochroma (Bombax) Sw.); some people eat rotten wood. | 22 | 29 |
| H27a In H27 family | A hole in the ground where a stake was driven. | When creating the earth, a negative character asks a positive character for as much earth as is necessary to prop up a staff, stake. | 21 | 29 |
| H35 | Decaying teeth. | Human teeth are made of fragile material. Usually, the motif explains the aetiology of toothache. | 24 | 29 |
| H43a In H43 family | Broken figures. | Having created the human body, the creator leaves. At this time, another character tries to break the figure, which has not yet come to life. | 21 | 29 |
| I125 | Hyades – animal jaw. | Hyades (sometimes, possibly, Pleiades or Orion) – jaw or severed head of a large animal or anthropomorphic creature. | 17 | 29 |
| I37B In I37 family | Mushrooms are associated with the world of the dead. | Mushrooms are associated with the dead, the afterlife, evil spirits, and disease. See motif I37. | 6 | 29 |
| I46b In I46 family | The rainbow predicts the harvest. | The colour of the rainbow can be used to predict the harvest of individual crops. | 18 | 29 |
| I81 | Waters fall into the abyss. | Earthly waters fall into the abyss. | 26 | 29 |
| I82d In I82 family | Morning and Evening Stars – Man and Woman. | The Morning and Evening Stars are contrasted as man and woman. See motifs I82a, I82b. | 32 | 29 |
| I82i In I82 family | Venus – Zahra/Zura. | The name of the object in the night sky (usually Venus) sounds like Zukhra, Zahra, Zura, etc. | 25 | 29 |
| I87 | Skull cave. | The characters use an object belonging to the world of giants (a skull, an animal shoulder blade, a mitten) as a shelter. Cf. I87C: animals use an object belonging to the world of humans (a skull, a mitten, a sieve, etc.) as a shelter. | 19 | 29 |
| I87ac In I87 family | A bone in the eye. | Something huge gets into a person's eye, which he mistakes for a speck of dust. Usually, a bird carries away an animal or fish and drops a bone into the man's eye. It is difficult to find and remove (to do this, they get into a boat and float it inside the eye, throw a net into the eye, pull it out with oxen, etc.). | 17 | 29 |
| J59 | Following the arrow to the sky. | To reach the sky, one must shoot an arrow that will pierce the vault of heaven. See motif J58; see motif J59A: a man flies after or on an arrow (without the motif of an arrow piercing the vault of heaven). | 83 | 29 |
Tradition and narrative counts are the stored catalogue totals for each entry.