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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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| F48 | Why women are different. | Individual women differ physically because the pieces of flesh divided from the first woman were not identical, or because the males who copulated with the first woman were animals of different species. | 4 | 5 |
| F54d In F54 family | Conceives after drinking urine. | A woman gives birth to a boy after accidentally drinking animal urine, or a female animal gives birth to a boy after drinking a man's urine. | 4 | 5 |
| F68 | The supposed dead woman dresses up as a man. | A woman pretends to be dead or actually dies. Her (former) lover comes to her grave. She goes with him, trying to avoid exposure, puts on men's clothes, but is eventually recognised. | 4 | 5 |
| F77B In F77 family | Hanging on the penis. | A man cannot free himself for a long time after copulating with his partner, as a result of which his penis ends up high above the ground. See motif F19, motif F21. | 4 | 2 |
| F80B In F80 family | Left unattended. | The vaginas were left unattended and became damaged. See motif F80. | 4 | 4 |
| F82a In F82 family | What the owl cries about. | In order to lure a forbidden marriage partner into their hammock, the character cries out in the voices of birds and animals or interprets their voices in their own way. | 4 | 4 |
| F84 | Imitation of chastity. | A guest or younger brother has sexual intercourse with the wife of the host or older brother. Wanting to demonstrate long abstinence, the character sprinkles ash on the head of his penis or smears it with fruit juice. | 4 | 5 |
| I109 | The Milky Way – the road of the heavenly bodies. | The Milky Way – the road along which the Sun and Moon travel. | 4 | 4 |
| I129 | The Heron Constellation. | The rainy season is associated with the appearance of the Heron constellation in the sky. | 4 | 4 |
| I137 | The Lapti Constellation. | One of the constellations is associated with footwear, usually with (worn-out) bast shoes. | 4 | 5 |
| I30 | The lord of the dead meets women. | In the world of the dead, its master or mistress copulates with all new arrivals. | 4 | 13 |
| 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 |
| I60a In I60 family | Milky Way – a stripe on the belly. | The Milky Way – a stripe associated with a longitudinal stripe on an animal's body. | 4 | 4 |
| J19c In J19 family | Torn out tongue. | A demonic character comes to a woman and tears out her tongue. She dies (and comes back to life when her tongue is found and returned). | 4 | 7 |
| j23e In j23 family | Flies through the body of a cannibal. | Wanting to make sure that the enemy is really dead, an insect or bird penetrates its body from one end and exits from the other. | 4 | 4 |
| J33a In J33 family | An old woman beats a scarecrow. | A boy, a young man, or two children live in an old woman's house. They kill her husband—a man or a large animal—and make a scarecrow out of him. Angry that her husband is not responding to her, the old woman beats the scarecrow and then discovers that her husband has been killed. See motif J33. | 4 | 4 |
| J51b In J51 family | A piece is missing: the reborn moon. | The moon has been eaten or has died and its body has decomposed. It is revived, but a small part (the bone) is missing. This determines the characteristics of the moon or the characteristics of human anatomy. | 4 | 5 |
| J58b In J58 family | Door to the sky. | With the help of a chain of arrows, the sky or the sun is pulled down or pushed up, or a hole is made in the sky. | 4 | 4 |
| J62b1 In J62 family | The mistress of the island turns men into animals. | A sorceress living on an island turns men into animals. | 4 | 4 |
| J6B In J6 family | Blinding of the victim. | The mother of the heroes is not killed, but loses her sight. | 4 | 4 |
| K13d In K13 family | Leg hanging in the sky. | A group of boys reaches the sky, the last one's leg is cut off or torn off. | 4 | 6 |
| K155c In K155 family | The girl on the scales. | The father regularly weighs his daughter and learns of her pregnancy when she becomes heavier. | 4 | 4 |
| K170 | Water without frogs, land without flies. | The character sets off in search of a place where there are no ordinary creatures that live everywhere (water without frogs, air without flies). | 4 | 6 |
| K180 | The time of the wolf and the time of the fox. | The ruler demands an explanation of his dream. The snake tells the man that this dream signifies the coming of a time when people tend to behave in a certain way. This happens several times. Each time, the man's behaviour towards the snake confirms her words. | 4 | 5 |
| K181a In K181 family | Placing a hand on a horse's back. | When a person puts their hand on a horse's back, it bends over and falls. This is a sign of heroic strength. | 4 | 6 |
| K27f3 In K27 family | Fill the feather bed with feathers. | The character must quickly obtain enough feathers to fill a feather bed or pillow. | 4 | 7 |
| K27yy3 In K27 family | Obtaining the fruits of a dangerous tree. | The hero must bring the fruits growing on a tree that is dangerous to approach. | 4 | 5 |
| K27z2 In K27 family | Separated from her son, she avoided incest, ATU 674. | A noble woman is forced to leave her home, gives birth to a son, and is separated from him. The young man grows up and almost marries his mother, but at the last moment everything is explained. {The Sudanese text, attributed to this plot in el-Shamy 2004 and subsequently in Uther 2004, does not fit the definition; it is quite possible that the Latvians, Romanians and Ukrainians are also mentioned incorrectly in Uther 2004}. | 4 | 5 |
| k33c8 In k33 family | Girl in a walnut. | A young man obtains a girl who is inside a nut (walnut or hazelnut, but not coconut). | 4 | 4 |
| K35a2 In K35 family | Beast with a glowing skin. | A man kills an animal with glowing fur. Upon learning of this, an authoritative figure gives him difficult tasks. | 4 | 4 |
| K44a In K44 family | The frog pretends to be a mother. | A frog or toad (coastal Koryaks: triton) kidnaps or finds a boy and lies that she is his real mother. See motif K44. | 4 | 5 |
| K56ac In K56 family | A row of stones and a row of logs. | A girl finds herself in a forest hut, where a bear arrives. He orders her to make him a bed out of stones and logs. | 4 | 5 |
| K65c2 In K65 family | Man and tiger. | A woman or female animal gives birth to several sons, including a human and a tiger. | 4 | 7 |
| L108f In L108 family | Luring from the bottom. | A character (girl, boy) finds themselves in water, and the antagonist lures them to shore by imitating the voice of their father, brother or sister. | 4 | 5 |
| L119 | Battle in the air. | The hero and antagonist fight in the air, tearing off each other's limbs. Usually, their allies on the ground try to preserve the limbs of their leader and destroy those of their enemy. | 4 | 8 |
| L15g1 In L15 family | One family member kills another, knowing his secret. | A person knows a secret on which the life of a loved one (husband, son, wife) depends and, after a quarrel, commits an act that is insignificant to an outside observer but leads to the immediate death of the other. | 4 | 5 |
| L42f In L42 family | The prey escaped, the wife was killed. | The character intended for consumption slips away unnoticed. The master of the house thinks that his wife has eaten him alone and cuts open her stomach. | 4 | 11 |
| L65c1 In L65 family | Sisters fly away from a cannibal. | Three or more sisters have the ability to fly and fly away from the cannibal – their older sister or mother. Only the youngest is saved. | 4 | 5 |
| L7b In L7 family | Mistakenly chasing a calabash. | While chasing a person, spirit, monster or beast, he mistakenly throws himself after a calabash floating down the river. | 4 | 4 |
| 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 |
| l93d In l93 family | The hedgehog as helper. | The hedgehog, resorting to cunning, helps the hero and saves him. | 4 | 5 |
| L94c In L94 family | Son or daughter sacrificed. | If a deity grants victory, a person promises to sacrifice to it the first person who comes out to meet them at home. A son or daughter comes out. | 4 | 5 |
| M11b In M11 family | Meat extracted from the body. | A woman feeds a man with good-quality meat or fat, which she cuts from her own flesh or extracts from her body, and stops doing so when he learns about the source of the food. | 4 | 6 |
| M163C In M163 family | Money thrown into the sea. | A person is advised to throw money into the water and take only what floats up. This brings him happiness. | 4 | 4 |
| 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 |
| M23a In M23 family | The turtle asks to be soaked, ATU 122G(2). | The turtle says that before eating it, it must be properly soaked in water, but once in the water, it swims away. | 4 | 4 |
| M29T In M29 family | Trickster - Armadillo | See the motives in square brackets. | 4 | 2 |
| M38a2 In M38 family | The hen boils eggs | The hen (other bird) cooks her own eggs and serves them to other animal persons (who imitated her with disastrous consequences) | 4 | 4 |
| M38d4 In M38 family | The Hunting Needle, ATU 90 | Several characters that embody small objects (and a squirrel with them) travel together. The needle penetrates the body of a large animal and kills it. (In the Baltic-Finnish texts, the needle first finds items that others find useless, but after the animal was caught, everything found turned out to be in demand for cooking meat). | 4 | 5 |
| M39a2e In M39 family | Forgotten name | Forgetting his name, a fool remembers it when he accidentally hears a word. | 4 | 3 |
Tradition and narrative counts are the stored catalogue totals for each entry.