#Stith Thompson

[theres-a-motif-for-that]

Be me: look through the Thompson Motif-Index for a final paper, find one joke, create a whole new blog for it

[encantada29]

(via H. Tests) Le motif H.Test, classé sous la lettre "H" dans le système de classification de Thompson, se réfère aux épreuves, aux tests ou aux défis que les personnages rencontrent au cours de leurs aventures. Ces épreuves peuvent prendre diverses formes, allant de tâches héroïques à des quêtes intellectuelles. Elles servent souvent à mesurer la bravoure, la sagesse ou la moralité des protagonistes.

[petermorwood]

The 2024 International Discworld Convention in Birmingham was great fun, with bright new faces, familiar old faces and the sort of catch-up gossip that goes on all weekend when our last DWCon was 2018 (2020 was COVID, 2022 was My Bestie's Wedding).

There were some Not-Seen faces too, since WorldCon happening the very next weekend in Glasgow may have meant a choice of One or The Other. There'll be another DWCon in 2026, but it'll be a few years before another Worldcon is "just up the road".

Of course there were Other Reasons for missing faces, because Time isn't the only thing that passes between cons. :-(

Anyway, I took a full week off active posting - queued reblogs could take care of themselves though some of THOSE may reappear with Useful(?) Comments - and now, as has been said elsewhere:

"Well, I'm back." :->

*****

This is the Stith Thompson Index of Folklore Motifs, as I remember it from the School library more than half a century ago.

Now it's the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index, which suggests it's even bigger.

And I bet, somewhere in all those cross-referenced motifs and tropes, there's one which describes what this cat is doing.

"Helpful Animal (319.7.5) rewards Hero Kindness (247.3.3) with (a) advice; (b) encouragement; (c) warning; (d) guidance; (e) a combination of several or all, in varying sequence."

Something like that, anyway.

If I had cause to write the action in that clip, I'd be sure to mention the cat was carrying salt, not flour (Because Reasons) and that the little pause halfway to ensure a good flow wasn't done by accident.

I'm not making this stuff up, BTW: ask @dduane! :->

[comicaurora]

Do your rember when you mentioned the thing about the fantacy codex of troaps that sounds like somthing out of an Urban fantacy serise. the whole "229, weve got a 229, a ex wife haunting her new husbands wife" thing.

Do you rember what it was called, what video that was, or have a link to the index. beacuse i would verry much like to flick though it.

I don't remember the video specifically, it might've been the Lindworm folktale - but the trope codex is the Stith Thompson Folklore Index! There are a few other classification systems rattling around too.

[thearcanecat]

Hatchetfield headcanons?

Let’s see…

Holloway has lots of scars from living for centuries and hides them with the jacket. These include:

Lightning scars

Wiggly: sucker/tentacle marks

Pokey: cracks

Blinky: eye like circular pattern. Red vein squiggles at end.

Tinky: hoof print

Nibbly: bite marks

Her accent gets stronger when she’s mad. Same for Duke, but you rarely hear it.

Original name was Holly-May Logan.

The strange carving it’s mentioned she has in Killer Track, is a part of Pokey’s mask.

Ryan Reynolds is the person running against Solomon for mayor. He’s pushing the problematic pooch story because it shows how horrible the town has gotten under Solomon’s rule. You’d think the disappearance of his wife right before he got elected would be a bigger deal, but no, time for our daily Peanuts the Hatchetfield Pocket Squirrel segment!

The Obnoxious Teen is actually different versions of Pete after an encounter with the Bastard Box. He now lives in a never ending hell of minimum wage jobs.

Grace’s birthday is September 9th, buy a priest a beer day.

The Honey Queen sacrifice takes place on the summer solstice at midnight.

Description of the tree that grew from Willabella: Gnarled roots extend from a bulbous center. No leaves hang from its crown of branches. It is not natural. Nothing grows near it, except the apples that grow for its branches, never ripe and always rotten. A hollow in the center is swarming with spiders whose web spans across it. Several scars are evident from where the Hatchetmen, once they realized their mistake, tried to cut it down. From its branches hand charms of protection and containment that replace old ones of worship. It grows behind the old Waylon Hall, over the sight of Willabella’s execution. Like the Hall, many rumors swirl around it and foolish children often dare each other to touch the bark.

The Blade of Truth that MacNamara uses on the Sniggles is one of multiple PEIP has constructed. With help from Holloway, they were able to harness the White’s energy into physical form. Each Blade requires a secret to be whispered into it as it forms, one no one has ever heard before. If someone tells a lie while holding the Blade, it shatters.

The Foster family are descended from Willabella and a Hatchetman with the last name Forester. Willabella had no love for him and only got pregnant to delay her execution.

The Stockworth family vacations in Hatchetfield because they have connections with the Church of the Starry children. Lucy is not aware if this.

Charles Coven was part of PEIP and went by Carlo at the time.

PEIP has ID numbers based on the Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk-Literature. Basically a collection of a bunch of different motifs in folklore.

Wilbur: D1310.10.1. Magic apple gives supernatural knowledge.

Holloway (Holliway this identity): G220.0.1. "Black" and "white" witches. Malevolent and benevolent.

John: B147.2.1.2. Eagle as omen of victory.

Xander: J1291.2. Theological questions answered by propounding simple questions in science.

Douglas Keane Sr. was an informant for PEIP. Basically, PEIP goes around to various people in professions where the supernatural may be encountered (law enforcement, medical, park rangers etc.) and gives them a little presentation with very vague language about if they seen anything unnatural, or out if the ordinary, to give their office a call. Since Hatchetfield is such a hotspot, Douglas knows a lot more about the supernatural than most informants do and is on first name basis with several PEIP agents. (This is heavily based off a book called The Rook by Daniel O’Malley.)

[adarkrainbow]

When looking at witches in fairytales, I formed a little space for the witch in "The maiden who seeks her brothers" fairytale, bird-subtype.

By this I mean the most famous take/type of this fairytale type, about a girl who discovers that her older brothers are now birds lost somewhere in the world, and she must undergo various trials to save them. While sometimes the transformation of the older brothers is due to something else entirely, quite frequently it is due to a witch being involved and setting a curse upon them.

The brothers Grimm made this story famous by collecting various takes on this tale: The Seven Ravens, The Six Swans, The Twelve Brothers. Andersen also wrote his own take on it, "The Wild Swans". Asbjornsen and Moe also made it popular thanks to their Norwegian version, "The Twelve Wild Ducks". In recent media the Storyteller TV show created its own variant, with The Three Ravens.

I see on the Internet people talk a LOT about "The Children of Lir" as the ancestor and predecessor of this story-type. Is it true that it was Joseph Jacobs who first highlighted the link between this Irish legend and the fairytale-type? I don't know, but the Internet LOVE the Children of Lir.

However I want to say: spare some love for the... I hate to say "actual", but clearly more direct ancestor to this story. The tale of the swan-children, from Dolopathos.

I was thinking back about this because right now I am reading a collection of medieval tales, and this story is within it. Checking out some articles, I see that Stith Thompson was apparently the one who most famously pointed it as the ancestor of the fairytale-type.

If you don't know, "Dolopathos" is a medieval romance (Latin/French) that forms a European variation of the "Seven Sages" book-type, and it contains this fascinating history of the swan-children which is... You know how often you discover that the literary ancestors of fairytales we know today actually compile many stories we think of today as separate? When you look back at Perrault or madame d'Aulnoy or Basile, etc, you see how fairytales used to be multi-parters and much longer, and they were broken into separate types and stories throughout time? Dolopathos' swan-children story is one of those.

The story begins with one of those stories of "A man forces an otherwordly woman to marry her by stealing an item of hers when she bathes" (you know, it is a story famous, be the woman a swan-maiden or a selkie). Then you have the sequence so recurring in various European fairytales of "The evil mother in law makes her son believe his wife gave birth to animals, so that the real children are on their own elsewhere and the mother is banished to live with animals and mistreated". THEN you finally get to the "Maiden who seeks her brothers" story, as the evil mother-in-law makes sure the kids are stuck in swan shape.

Reading this story after reading many variations of these fairytale type (especially in France), it makes sense why they are so often inter-connected and intertwined from region to region

[laurasimonsdaughter]

Do you have any recommendations on good ways to find mythic/folkloric references? My untrained low-knowledge self currently only really uses what I find through search engines. That rarely lets me stumble upon niche sites that collate myths/folklore unless I already know the exact phrasing or name of the story the thing is from. If it helps, currently I'm trying to research banishment/containment devices for evil spirits, demons, etc. The demon sealing jar I've repeatedly come across in media especially intrigues me, though its origin seems to not exist???

I do have a post with my go-to websites for research, but I must admit those are better for finding folktales than specific mythological concepts.

For your specific research question I would advise you to pick a culture and if possible a time period to look into. It will be easier to find niche information if you are searching for something specific, rather than something general.

As for demons being sealed in jars, the concept of an malevolent spirit (as in supernatural entity, not ghost) being trapped in a bottle, jar or other container, is a tolerably widespread motif in folklore. In fact "The Spirit in the Bottle" has it's own tale type: ATU 331. It shows up in Europe from the Middle Ages onward, but while Stith Thompson (the T in ATU) was still uncertain whether it was originally European or Middle Eastern, Hans-Jörg Uther (the U in ATU) considers it to be of Jewish and Arabic origin.

Today the most well-known versions are probably these two:

The Fisherman and the Jinni, one of the stories in One Thousand and One Nights that was already present in its earliest known Arabic versions, from the 14th century. In it a fisherman catches a copper jar, sealed with lead that has the Seal of Solomon/Suleiman pressed into it. He opens it and an ifrit (powerful, malevolent jinn) emerges, who was imprisoned by Solomon. The jinn threatens to kill him, is tricked into going back into the jar, then released in return for pledging to help the fisherman.

The Spirit in the Glass Bottle, collected by the Grimms in Bökendorf, Germany, published in 1815. Here a malevolent spirit called Mercurius is trapped in a glass bottle stuck between the roots of a tree. He is freed by the kind protagonist, tricked into going back into the bottle after threatening to kill him, then freed again in return for a magical gift. How the bottle is able to contain the powerful spirit is not explained. (I grew up with a version of this story where the spirit is not released a second time.)

There are variants on the bottle/jar however, for example:

Virgilius the Sorcerer, a legend-like tale published in The Violet Fairy Book (1901) by Andrew Lang. Presumably written by him (or his wife), inspired by Medieval legends. Here the evil spirit is trapped in a small hole in the floor of a cave closed off with a bolt.

The legend of Paracelsus, a German tale published in English in 1892 in Folk-lore and Legends Germany. Its editor seems to be Charles John Tibbits, but no translators or sources are named. In this story the spirit has been trapped in a fir tree by a magician, which has a small stopper pushed into its trunk, sealed with three crosses.

(These might remind you of the Arthurian Merlin, sorcerer with demonic heritage, being imprisoned in a tree, cave, or stone by Niviane/Nimue/Viviane, first named in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle from the 13th century.)

Now, I prefer to stay in the realm of folktales rather than religious texts, but I will try to briefly explain the Jewish and Islamic foundations for this tale type - the link between King Solomon and controlling demons/jinn - under the cut:

The Tanakh describes King Solomon as the last to rule both Israel and Judah, son and successor to King David. He is considered a Jewish prophet, granted divine wisdom (I Kings 3:12). In the Talmud Solomon is described to have tricked Ashmedai/Asmodeus, the prince of the demons, into helping him to build the first temple. The text mentions a chain and a ring engraved with a sacred name of God, which are used to bind and then control the demon (Gittin 68a-b). (There is a Greek text of uncertain date and origin called The Testament of Solomon that says the ring has the seal of God on it.)

Solomon is considered an important prophet as well as ruler of the Israelites in the Quran, who is told to have had control over the wind and over many jinn (Quran 34:12, 38:36-37). A prevalent interpretation of the text states that this power is linked to Solomon possessing a ring that was given to him by Allah, and temporarily taken away as punishment (38.34 Jalal - Al-Jalalayn).

If you want a more historical, scholarly take on the folklore motif of imprisoning and controlling demons, take a look at this: Allegra Iafrate, ““Il demone nell’ampolla”: Solomon, Virgil, Aeolus, and the Long Metamorphosis of Rain Rituals and Wind-Taming Practices”, Revue de l’histoire des religions, 3 | 2017, 387-425.

I haven't read it in full, but it looks like it might give you some inspiration!

[ettawritesnstudies]

[Image ID: A sketchy digital painting of a brown weasel looking cute. This is a character named Kit-Kat from Etta's upcoming middle grade novel, Runaways. He's drawn on lined school paper and has doodles around it saying "Best boy" with hearts. It's been cropped from a larger image as a teaser. End image ID.]

I was reminded during the write in last night that I should plug my mailing-list more often so here's why you should sign up!

YOU GET FREE STUFF WHEN YOU SIGN UP: If you like reading about mythology, legends, fairy tales, folklore, you get an exclusive lore document about the world of Runaways!

SERIOUSLY THO THE LORE: I have an extensive analysis talking about the difference between adapting a story in the public domain vs taking inspiration for world building purposes. This document is 16 pages long, and it includes reference numbers to the Stith Thompson tale type index, illustrations, and in-universe "field journal" excerpts. I'm super proud of this meta and genuinely don't talk about it enough.

YOU GET EXCERPTS: I don't post my final draft type work publicly anymore due to the AI scraping, but the mailing list gets to see things like song lyrics and full passages before anyone else.

YOU GET EARLY UPDATES AND BEHIND THE SCENES: I've got a lot of big projects in the works I've been tight-lipped about on social media for various reasons, but the mailing list gets to know what's actually going on IRL and what's coming up.

YOU GET SPECIAL PRIVILEGES: Want to see me cover a topic on my blog? Ask me directly! Want to get dibs on ARCs, preorders, see the cover design and possible illustrations, and other big updates associated with the Runaways release? Signing up is free.

I ONLY EMAIL YOU ONCE A MONTH: I swear I don't have the bandwidth for anything more than that.

[fullbattleregalia]

Google: Okay, so you’ve now searched slang terms for various poker hands, Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature, and “revolver gun types.”

Me: Yup. You forgot me looking up the canon heights of a bunch of different RWBY characters.

Google: …should I be concerned?

Me: No, no - I just want my fanfic about this fantasy world full of reality bending superpowers to be as accurate as possible and contain all the neurotically obscure references I can possibly squeeze in.

[merymoonbeam]

Blood Rite–Sleeping King

So in my wild hunt post I theorized that Fionn was not dead but rather he is sleeping because in actual myths he is.

According to the most popular account of Fionn's death, he is not dead at all, rather, he sleeps in a cave, surrounded by the Fianna. One day he will awake and defend Ireland in the hour of her greatest need. In one account, it is said that he will arise when the Dord Fiann, the hunting horn of the Fianna, is sounded three times, and he will be as strong and as well as he ever was.

it is connected with "sleeping king under a mountain" myth.

The king asleep in mountain (D 1960.2 in Stith Thompson's motif index system)[1] is a prominent folklore trope found in many folktales and legends. Thompson termed it as the Kyffhäuser type.[

I thought it would be Ramiel bc in acosf we have eris saying "we didnt look under ramiel"

Eris gave him a mocking smile, but continued, “Unsurprisingly, the Illyrians were never curious enough to see what secrets lie beneath Ramiel. If it, too, was carved up like the others by ancient hands.”

Lets go to the actual theory...

Blood rite and why it happens?

In these sleeping king under a mountain myths there is this info...

In the Brothers Grimm version, the hero speaks with the herdsman. Their conversation typically involves the hero asking, "Do the eagles (or ravens) still circle the mountaintop?" The herdsman, or a mysterious voice, replies, "Yes, they still circle the mountaintop." "Then begone! My time has not yet come."

Another one

Enchanted by a mysterious spell, the old Kaiser Frederick I. Barbarossa was transported to an underground palace in the Kyffhäuser Mountains where he is still in a deep sleep sitting on an ivory chair at a large round marble table, with his head resting in his hands. His red beard glows like embers and has grown right through the table down to its feet and almost all the way around it. Every hundred years the Kaiser wakes from his deep sleep, moves his head and blinks to summon his faithful gnome Alberich. He asks Alberich to climb up to the outside of the mountain to see if the ravens are still squawking and flying around it. If they are, great sadness overcomes the Kaiser and he murmurs into his beard that he must wait yet another hundred years before he can return to the outside to bring unity and peace to the world. Sighing, he closes his eyes again and sleeps for another hundred years. Only when his beard has grown all the way around the round marble table will his waiting come to an end because at this point, a proud eagle will sweep up into the air, frighten the ravens away, the Kaiser and his faithful followers will awake from the spell, climb up and out into his worldly palace and restore order everywhere.

So...

if ravens are still flying= back to sleep

if ravens are not there= wake up and bring unity to land

Illyrians...Ramiel? Are they the ravens? So what if blood rite is that time when he "wakes up" to check? Thats why illyrians get magic that time? Why blood rite happens at all is because of this?

That's all 🫡🫡

[dearorpheus]

hello madi, hope you're well 🤍 was wondering if you have a reading / watch list for bones and all (2022)? been thinking about this film again.

hi sweetheart. am plagued by this film as well.

The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood The Vegetarian by Han Kang Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite The Road by Cormac McCarthy Lila by Marilynne Robinson The Cannibal’s Canción by Gloria Anzaldúa Winter of Artifice by Anaïs Nin—"I felt myself caught in the immense jaws of his desire, felt myself dissolving, ripping open to his descent. I felt myself yielding up to his dark hunger. An immense jaw closing upon my feelings, my feelings smouldering, rising from me like smoke from a black mass. [...] He is not concerned to know whether I can live or breathe within the dark cavern of his whale-like being, within the whale-belly of his ego." "Love of the Wolf" from Cixous' Stigmata:

Carson's Eros the Bittersweet:

can i say Bazterrica's Tender is the Flesh? Süskind's Perfume? Lévi-Strauss' We Are All Cannibals—"and after all, the most simple means to identify others with oneself is to eat them"—?

reaching..... can i say Kristeva's Powers of Horror?

^sort of re: the oral stage of psychic development

Amy Heneveld's words on the recurrent motif of cannibalism in medieval French literature, categorised (by Stith Thompson) as The Eaten Heart:

then, for films: Badlands (1973) dir. Terrence Malick Natural Born Killers (1994) dir. Oliver Stone Caníbal (2013) dir. Manuel Martín Cuenca The Lure (2015) dir. Agnieszka Smoczynska—"What if you fall in love?" "Don't be silly." "Would you eat him?" Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) dir. Alain Resnais—"I like you. How unlikely. I like you. How slow all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know. You're destroying me. You're good for me. You're destroying me. You're good for me. I have time. Please, devour me."

[theres-a-motif-for-that]

Hi there!

Welcome to There's-a-Motif-for-That, where I find and meme folktale motifs in pop culture and modern stories.

This is mostly for fun, but I do think it's cool to see how these things still show up in our current storytelling. I think it can show us some commonality/universality in human experiences and the stories we tell to express those experiences. And it gives a sense of connection to oral tradition, and the enduring/adaptive nature of these elements (though to be fair most of my connections tend to go more by just the title instead of how the motif is actually used. So sometimes it’s more of a stretch for a joke, but hey memes are folklore too).

Also it's just really hilarious the types of things included in the index, they are just so random and oddly specific sometimes, it's like is that seriously a common occurrence??

What is a motif?

I'm using Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Which is a 6 volume (fat AF) catalogue of motifs compiled and organized by folklorist Stith Thompson in 1932–1936 and 1955–1958. As such it is a tad outdated at times, and not without it's limitations (it tends to have a Eurocentric bias). Even with 2471 pages (PAGES) of motifs, something like this could never be truly comprehensive. (Other scholars have made additional regional-specific indexes, so maybe I'll get to those someday too!)

The Index is mainly used in conjunction with the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (yes same Thompson) for cross-referencing tales and as an organizational tool for archives (which is what the numbers are for). But where the ATU Index compiles tale-types, self-sufficient plots recurring in stories around the world, the Motif-Index is for the individual details and narrative elements within those tales. Or as Thompson puts it:

"A motif is the smallest element in a tale having a power to persist in tradition. In order to have this power it must have something unusual and striking about it"

How to read an entry:

(source)

Tbh, activity on this blog will be pretty sporadic. Also my pop culture knowledge is limited, but if anyone else is silly enough to take a dive through 2471 pages of motifs, I’ll totally take submissions or recommendations in asks

Format: I post a screenshot of the motif and a related gif, with an image link to the full scene (if i can find it) for those who need full context (though most are pretty self-explanatory). Image descriptions will be in the alt. Sometimes I'll post a scene directly, or an image if it's from literature with the context in the image description. Some posts will be compilations for either multiple examples of a motif, or multiple motifs found in one piece of media.

For the sake of organization I’m also tagging based on the broad index categories (bold for ones I've gotten to already):

A. Mythological Motifs B. Animal Motifs C. Motifs of Tabu D. Magic E. The Dead F. Marvels G. Ogres H. Tests J. The Wise and the Foolish K. Deceptions L. Reversals of Fortune M. Ordaining the Future N. Chance and Fate P. Society Q. Rewards and Punishments R. Captives and Fugitives S. Unnatural Cruelty T. Sex U. The Nature of Life V. Religion W. Traits of Character X. Humor Z. Miscellaneous Groups of Motifs

(I've tagged them below for easy navigation, along with some other category tags)

[encantada29]

(via G. Ogres)

[shootingstar-scuderia]

yall i found my copy of stith thompson's folklore motif index once finals are done we are sooooo back

[redsixwing]

You might enjoy researching folktale motifs (essentially, exactly this!) Or, if you're interested in an academic read, Stith Thompson's "The Folktale."

Also I'd totally reblog those polls.

i'm not doing this because it would be a lot of work but a while ago there was a really good thread on twitter about fairytale retellings and the essential core of a story - people have different feelings about what the essential features of any given fairytale are, so if the reader's essential feature of, say, Cinderella is different from the author's, they'll say the book isn't really a retelling of Cinderella.

for example, to me Cinderella's essential features are

mistreatment by family

unexpected help from an outside figure

mysterious attendance at an exclusive event

recognition by a token afterwards

there are a couple more i'd like to see but aren't essential.

anyway that's a lot of preamble to the part that's work, but i think an interesting poll series would be "what do you think the essential features of [fairytale] are?"

[adarkrainbow]

Queering kinship in "The Maiden who Seeks her Brothers" (A)

As I promised before, I will share with you some of the articles contained in the queer-reading study-book "Queering the Grimms". Due to the length of the articles and Tumblr's limitations, I will have to fragment them. Let's begin with an article from the Faux Feminities segment, called Queering Kinship in "The Maiden who Seeks her Brothers", written by Jeana Jorgensen. (Illustrations provided by me)

The fairy tales in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, or Children’s and Household Tales, compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are among the world’s most popular, yet they have also provoked discussion and debate regarding their authenticity, violent imagery, and restrictive gender roles. In this chapter I interpret the three versions published by the Grimm brothers of ATU 451, “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers,” focusing on constructions of family, femininity, and identity. I utilize the folkloristic methodology of allomotific analysis, integrating feminist and queer theories of kinship and gender roles. I follow Pauline Greenhill by taking a queer view of fairy tale texts from the Grimms’ collection, for her use of queer implies both “its older meaning as a type of destabilizing redirection, and its more recent sense as a reference to sexualities beyond the heterosexual.” This is appropriate for her reading of “Fitcher’s Bird” (ATU 311, “Rescue by the Sister”) as a story that “subverts patriarchy, heterosexuality, femininity, and masculinity alike” (2008, 147). I will similarly demonstrate that “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” only superficially conforms to the Grimms’ patriarchal, nationalizing agenda, for the tale rather subversively critiques the nuclear family and heterosexual marriage by revealing ambiguity and ambivalence. The tale also queers biology, illuminating transbiological connections between species and a critique of reproductive futurism. Thus, through the use of fantasy, this tale and fairy tales in general can question the status quo, addressing concepts such as self, other, and home.

The first volume of the first edition of the Grimm brothers’ collection ap[1]peared in 1812, to be followed by six revisions during the brothers’ lifetimes (leading to a total of seven editions of the so-called large edition of their collection, while the so-called small edition was published in ten editions). The Grimm brothers published three versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” in the 1812 edition of their collection, but the tales in that volume underwent some changes over time, as did most of the tales. This was partially in an effort to increase sales, and Wilhelm’s editorial changes in particular “tended to make the tales more proper and prudent for bourgeois audiences” (Zipes 2002b, xxxi). “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” is one of the few tale types that the Grimms published multiply, each time giving titular focus to the brothers, as the versions are titled “The Twelve Brothers” (KHM 9), “The Seven Ravens” (KHM 25), and “The Six Swans” (KHM 49). However, both Stith Thompson and Hans-Jörg Uther, in their respective 1961 and 2004 revisions of the international tale type index, call the tale type “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers.” Indeed, Thompson discusses this tale in The Folktale under the category of faithfulness, par[1]ticularly faithful sisters, noting, “In spite of the minor variations . . . the tale-type is well-defined in all its major incidents” (1946, 110). Thompson also describes how the tale is found “in folktale collections from all parts of Europe” and forms the basis of three of the tales in the Grimm brothers’ collection (111).

In his Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Bengt Holbek classifies ATU 451 as a “feminine” tale, since its two main characters who wed at the end of the tale are a low-born young female and a high-born young male (the sister, though originally of noble birth in many versions, is cast out and essentially impoverished by the tale’s circumstances). Holbek notes that the role of a low-born young male in feminine tales is often filled by brothers: “The relationship between sister and brothers is characterized by love and help[1]fulness, even if fear and rivalry may also be an aspect in some tales (in AT 451, the girl is afraid of the twelve ravens; she sews shirts to disenchant them, however, and they save her from being burnt at the stake at the last moment)” (1987, 417). While Holbek conflates tale versions in this description, he is essentially correct about ATU 451; the siblings are devoted to one another, despite fearsome consequences.

The discrepancy between those titles that focus on the brothers and those that focus on the sister deserves further attention. Perhaps the Grimm brothers (and their informants?) were drawn to the more spectacular imagery of enchanted brothers. In Hans Christian Andersen’s well-known version of ATU 451, “The Wild Swans,” he too focuses on the brothers in the title. However, some scholars, including Thompson and myself, are more intrigued by the sister’s actions in the tale. Bethany Joy Bear, for instance, in her analysis of traditional and modern versions of ATU 451, concentrates on the agency of the silent sister-saviors, noting that the three versions in the Grimms’ collection “illustrate various ways of empowering the hero[1]ine. In ‘The Seven Ravens’ she saves her brothers through an active and courageous quest, while in ‘The Twelve Brothers’ and ‘The Six Swans’ her success requires redemptive silence” (2009, 45).

The three tales differ by more than just how the sister saves her brothers, though. In “The Twelve Brothers,” a king and queen with twelve boys are about to have another child; the king swears to kill the boys if the newborn is a girl so that she can inherit the kingdom. The queen warns the boys and they run away, and the girl later seeks them. She inadvertently picks flowers that turn her brothers into ravens, and in order to disenchant them she must remain silent; she may not speak or laugh for seven years. During this time, she marries a king, but his mother slanders her, and when the seven years have elapsed, she is about to be burned at the stake. At that moment, her brothers are disenchanted and returned to human form. They redeem their sister, who lives happily with her husband and her brothers.

In “The Seven Ravens,” a father exclaims that his seven negligent sons should turn into ravens for failing to bring water to baptize their newborn sister. It is unclear whether the sister remains unbaptized, thus contributing to her more liminal status. When the sister grows up, she seeks her brothers, shunning the sun and moon but gaining help from the stars, who give her a bone to unlock the glass mountain where her brothers reside. Because she loses the bone, the girl cuts off her small finger, using it to gain access to the mountain. She disenchants her brothers by simply appearing, and they all return home to live together.

In “The Six Swans,” a king is coerced into marrying a witch’s daughter, who finds where the king has stashed his children to keep them safe. The sorceress enchants the boys, turning them into swans, and the girl seeks them. She must not speak or laugh for six years and she must sew shirts from asters for them. She marries a king, but the king’s mother steals each of the three children born to the couple, smearing the wife’s mouth with blood to implicate her as a cannibal. She finishes sewing the shirts just as she’s about to be burned at the stake; then her brothers are disenchanted and come to live with the royal couple and their returned children. However, the sleeve of one shirt remained unfinished, so the littlest brother is stuck with a wing instead of an arm.

The main episodes of the tale type follow Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp’s structural sequence for fairy-tale plots: the tale begins with a villainy, the banishing and enchantment of the brothers, sometimes resulting from an interdiction that has been violated. The sister must perform a task in addition to going on a quest, and the tale ends with the formation of a new family through marriage. As Alan Dundes observes, “If Propp’s formula is valid, then the major task in fairy tales is to replace one’s original family through marriage” (1993, 124; see also Lüthi 1982). This observation holds true for heteronormative structures (such as the nuclear family), which exist in order to replicate themselves. In many fairy tales, the original nuclear family is discarded due to circumstance or choice. However, the sister in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” has not abandoned or been removed from her old family, unlike Cinderella, who ditches her nasty stepmother and stepsisters, or Rapunzel, who is taken from her birth parents, and so on. Although, admittedly, “The Seven Ravens” does not end in marriage, I do not plan to disqualify it from analysis simply because it doesn’t fit the dominant model, as Bengt Holbek does when comparing Danish versions of “King Wivern” (ATU 433B, “King Lindorm”).1 The fact that one of the tales does not end in marriage actually supports my interpretation of the tales as transgressive, a point to which I will return later.

Dundes’s (2007) notion of allomotif helps make sense of the kinship dynamics in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers.” In order to decipher the symbolic code of folktales, Dundes proposes that any motif that could fill the same slot in a particular tale’s plot should be designated an allomotif. Further, if motif A and motif B fulfill the same purpose in moving along the tale’s plot, then they are considered mutually substitutable, thus equivalent symbolically. What this assertion means for my analysis is that all the methods by which the brothers are enchanted and subsequently disenchanted can be treated as meaningful in relation to one another. One of the advantages of comparing allomotifs rather than motifs is that we can be assured that we are analyzing not random details but significant plot components. So in “The Six Swans” and “The Seven Ravens,” we see the parental curse causing both the banishment and the enchantment of the brothers, whereas in “The Twelve Brothers,” the brothers are banished and enchanted in separate moves. Even though the brothers’ exile and enchantment happen in a different sequence in the different texts, we must view their causes as functionally parallel. Thus the ire of a father concerned for his newborn daughter, the jealous rage of a stepmother, the homicidal desire of a father to give his daughter everything, and the innocent flower gathering of a sister can all be seen as threatening to the brothers. All of these actions lead to the dispersal and enchantment of the brothers, though not all are malicious, for the sister in “The Twelve Brothers” accidentally turns her brothers into ravens by picking flowers that consequently enchant them.

I interpret this equivalence as a metaphorical statement—threats to a family’s cohesion come in all forms, from well-intentioned actions to openly malevolent curses. The father’s misdirected love for his sole daughter in two versions (“The Twelve Brothers” and “The Seven Ravens”) translates to danger to his sons. This danger is allomotifically paralleled by how the sister, without even knowing it, causes her brothers to become enchanted, either by picking flowers in “The Twelve Brothers” or through the mere incident of her birth in “The Twelve Brothers” and “The Seven Ravens.” The fact that a father would prioritize his sole daughter over numerous sons is strange and reminiscent of tales in which a father explicitly expresses romantic de[1]sire for his daughter, as in “Allerleirauh” (ATU 510B), discussed in chapter 4 by Margaret Yocom. Even in “The Six Swans,” where a stepmother with magical powers enchants the sons, the father is implicated; he did not love his children well enough to protect them from his new spouse, and once the boys had been changed into swans and fled, the father tries to take his daughter with him back to his castle (where the stepmother would likely be waiting to dispose of the daughter as well), not knowing that by asserting control over her, he would be endangering her. The father’s implied ownership of the daughter in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” and the linking of inheritance with danger emphasize the conflicts that threaten the nuclear family. Both material and emotional resources are in limited supply in these tales, with disastrous consequences for the nuclear family, which fragments, as it does in all fairy tales (see Propp 1968).

Holbek reaches a similar conclusion in his allomotific analysis of ATU 451, though he focuses on Danish versions collected by Evald Tang Kristensen in the late nineteenth century. Holbek notes that the heroine is the actual “cause of her brothers’ expulsion in all cases, either—innocently—through being born or—inadvertently—through some act of hers” (1987, 550). The true indication of the heroine’s role in condemning her brothers is her role in saving them, despite the fact that other characters may superficially be blamed: “The heroine’s guilt is nevertheless to be deduced from the fact that only an act of hers can save her brothers.” However, Holbek reads the tale as revolving around the theme of sibling rivalry, which is more relevant to the cultural context in which Danish versions of ATU 451 were set, since the initial family situation in the tale was not always said to be royal or noble, and Holbek views the tales as reflecting the actual concerns and conditions of their peasant tellers (550; see also 406–9).2 Holbek also discusses the lack of resources that might lead to sibling rivalry, identifying physical scarcity and emotional love as two factors that could inspire tension between siblings.

The initial situation in the Grimms’ versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” is also a comment on the arbitrary power that parents have over their children, the ability to withhold love or resources or both. The helplessness of children before the strong feelings of their parents is cor[1]roborated in another Grimms’ tale, “The Lazy One and the Industrious One” (Zipes 2002b, 638).3 In this tale, which Jack Zipes translated among the “omitted tales” that did not make it into any of the published editions of the KHM, a father curses his sons for insulting him, causing them to turn into ravens until a beautiful maiden kisses them. Essentially, the fam[1]ily is a site of danger, yet it is a structure that will be replicated in the tale’s conclusion . . . almost.

But first, the sister seeks her brothers and disenchants them. The symbolic equation links, in each of the three tales, the sister’s silence (neither speaking nor laughing) for six years while sewing six shirts from asters, her seven years of silence (neither speaking nor laughing), and her cutting off her finger and using it to gain entry to the glass palace where she disenchants her brothers merely by being present. The theme unifying these allomotifs is sacrifice. The sister’s loss of her finger, equivalent to the loss of her voice, is a symbolic disempowerment. One loss is a physical mutilation, which might not impair the heroine terribly much; the choice not to use her voice is arguably more drastic, since her inability to speak for herself nearly causes her death in the tales.4 Both losses could be seen as equivalent to castration.5 However, losing her ability to speak and her ability to manipulate the world around her while at the same time displaying domestic competence in sewing equates powerlessness with feminine pursuits. Bear notes that versions by both the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen envision “a distinctly feminine savior whose work is symbolized by her spindle, an ancient emblem of women’s work” (2009, 46). Ruth Bottigheimer (1986) points out in her essay “Silenced Women in Grimms’ Tales” that the heroines in “The Twelve Brothers” and “The Six Swans” are forced to accept conditions of muteness that disempower them, which is part of a larger silencing that occurs in the tales; women both are explicitly forbidden to speak, and they have fewer declarative and interrogative speech acts attributed to them within the whole body of the Grimms’ texts.

Ironically, in performing subservient femininity, the sister fails to perform adequately as wife or mother, since the children she bears in one version (“The Six Swans”) are stolen from her. When the sister is married to the king, she gives birth to three children in succession, but each time, the king’s mother takes away the infant and smears the queen’s mouth with blood while she sleeps (Zipes 2002b, 170). Finally, the heroine is sentenced to death by a court but is unable to protest her innocence since she must not speak in order to disenchant her brothers. In being a faithful sister, the heroine cannot be a good mother and is condemned to die for it. This aspect of the tale could represent a deeply coded feminist voice.6 A tale collected and published by men might contain an implicitly coded feminist message, since the critique of patriarchal institutions such as the family would have to be buried so deeply as to not even be recognizable as a message in order to avoid detection and censorship (Radner and Lanser 1993, 6–9). The sis[1]ter in “The Six Swans” cannot perform all of the feminine duties required of her, and because she ostensibly allows her children to die, she could be accused of infanticide. Similarly, in the contemporary legend “The Inept Mother,” collected and analyzed by Janet Langlois, an overwhelmed mother’s incompetence indirectly kills one or all of her children.7 Langlois reads this legend as a coded expression of women’s frustrations at being isolated at home with too many responsibilities, a coded demand for more support than is usually given to mothers in patriarchal institutions. Essentially, the story is “complex thinking about the thinkable—protecting the child who must leave you—and about the unthinkable—being a woman not defined in relation to motherhood” (Langlois 1993, 93). The heroine in “The Six Swans” also occupies an ambiguous position, navigating different expectations of femininity, forced to choose between giving care and nurturance to some and withholding it from others.

Here, I find it productive to draw a parallel to Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus. Antigone defies the orders of her uncle Creon in order to bury her brother Polyneices and faces a death sentence as a result. Antigone’s fidelity to her blood family costs her not only her life but also her future as a productive and reproductive member of society. As Judith Butler (2000) clarifies in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Antigone transgresses both gender and kinship norms in her actions and her speech acts. Her love for her brother borders on the incestuous and exposes the incest taboo at the heart of kinship structure. Antigone’s perverse death drive for the sake of her brother, Butler asserts, is all the more monstrous because it establishes aberration at the heart of the norm (in this case the incest taboo). I see a similar logic operating in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers,” because according to allomotific equivalences, the heroine is condemned to die only in one version (“The Six Swans”) because she allegedly ate her children. In the other version that contains the marriage episode (“The Twelve Brothers”), the king’s mother slanders her, calling the maiden “godless,” and accuses her of wicked things until the king agrees to sentence her to death (Zipes 2002b, 35). As allomotific analysis reveals, in the three versions, the heroine is punished for being excessively devoted to her brothers, which is functionally the same as cannibalism and as being generally wicked (the accusation of the king’s mother in two of the versions).

In a sense, the heroine’s disproportionate devotion to her brothers kills her chance at marriage and kills her children, which from a queer stance is a comment on the performativity of sexuality and gender. According to Butler, gender performativity demonstrates “that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body” ([1990] 1999, xv). This illusion, that gender and sexuality are a “being” rather than a “doing,” is constantly at risk of exposure. When sexuality is exposed as constructed rather than natural, thus threatening the whole social-sexual system of identity formation, the threat must be eliminated.

One aspect of this system particularly threatened in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” is reproductive futurism, one form of compulsory teleological heterosexuality, “the epitome of heteronormativity’s desire to reach self-fulfillment by endlessly recycling itself through the figure of the Child” (Giffney 2008, 56; see also Edelman 2004). Reproductive futurism mandates that politics and identities be placed in service of the future and future children, utilizing the rhetoric of an idealized childhood. In his book on reproductive futurism, Lee Edelman links queerness and the death drive, stating, “The death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” (2004, 9). According to this logic, to prioritize anything other than one’s reproductive future is to refuse social viability and heteronormativity—this is what the heroine in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” does. Her excessive emotional ties to her brothers disfigure her future, aligning her with the queer, the unlivable, and hence the ungrievable. Refusing the linear narrative of reproductive futurism registers as “unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane” (4), words that could very well be used to describe a mother who is thought to be eating her babies and who cannot or will not speak to defend herself.

The heroine’s marriage to the king in two versions of the tale can also be examined from a queer perspective. Like the tale “Fitcher’s Bird,” which queers marriage by “showing male-female [marital] relationships as clearly fraught with danger and evil from their onset,” the Grimms’ two versions of ATU 451 that feature marriage call into question its sanctity and safety (Greenhill 2008, 150, emphasis in original). Marriage, though the ultimate goal of many fairy tales, does not provide the heroine with a supportive or nurturing environment. Bear comments that in versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” wherein a king discovers and marries the heroine, “the king’s discovery brings the sister into a community that both facilitates and threatens her work. The sister’s discovery brings her into a home, foreshadowing the hoped-for happy ending, but it is a false home, determined by the king’s desire rather than by the sister’s creation of a stable and complete community” (2009, 50)