Tale Types
Where a story in this collection is a telling of a type the folklore literature has named, the type is given here with every telling under it. 55 types over 82 stories.
Two creatures agree to keep house together and lay in a store against the winter. One of them eats it a little at a time, each trip covered by an invented christening, and names each imaginary godchild after how much of the pot is left.
A musician lures wild animals with his playing and offers to teach each one in turn to play. The lesson is really a trap, and each animal is left wedged, suspended or bound while he moves on to the next.
Princesses are carried underground, and a hero descends, defeats what holds them, and sends them up before him. His companions cut the rope, and the last stretch of the story is his own way back to the surface and to being believed.
Princesses wear their shoes through every night and nobody knows where they go, until a soldier follows them. Invisibility gets him there, and the proof he brings back is what ends it.
A girl is promised away before her birth and shut in a tower with no stair, which can only be climbed by her own hair. She is discovered and cast out, and the two are a long time apart before they find each other again.
ATU 312, Bluebeard
1 story
A husband gives his wife every key in the house and forbids her one door. She opens it, the blood will not wash off the key, and her rescue arrives at the last possible moment, usually on horseback.
ATU 313, The Magic Flight
3 stories
A hero in the power of a magician or an ogre is helped by the captor's own daughter, and the two run for it, throwing objects behind them that become a forest, a mountain and a lake. The story often ends with the hero forgetting her, and slowly remembering.
A boy apprenticed to a magician learns more than he was taught, escapes as an animal, and is pursued through a chain of shapes. He wins by changing shape once more than his master can.
A boy who cannot shudder goes looking for the feeling, keeps watch in haunted places, and is unmoved by all of it. What finally frightens him is small and domestic.
ATU 327A, Hansel and Gretel
1 story
Children abandoned in the wood find a house made of food and the creature that keeps it. Their escape is the girl's doing, and the trail they left behind them has been eaten.
Brothers take shelter with an ogre who means to kill them in the night. The smallest swaps the marks of identity while everyone sleeps, and the ogre destroys his own children instead.
A boy returns again and again to a giant's house, taking something better each time, until the last theft is the giant himself. He wins by nerve rather than strength, and the climb down is where the danger is.
A girl is sent through the wood to a relative's house, a wolf gets there first, and the girl asks her questions of a figure in the bed. The oldest tellings end there, and later ones send in a rescuer.
A man wins a supernatural bride, breaks the one condition attached to her, and loses her. The rest of the story is his journey back to her, through worn-out shoes and three helpers, to a wedding he arrives at just in time to stop.
ATU 402, The Animal Bride
2 stories
Three sons are sent to bring back a wife, and the youngest returns with a mouse, a cat or a frog. She performs the tasks the human brides fail, and she is a woman by the time anyone looks properly.
A true bride is replaced by a false one, often at a river crossing, and is left transformed or drowned while the impostor takes her place. She is restored when somebody notices that the wrong bride cannot do what the right one could.
ATU 408, The Love for Three Oranges
2 stories
A prince seeks three fruits, each holding a maiden who dies unless water is ready. He learns in time to save the third, and then loses her to a substitution he does not notice.
ATU 410, Sleeping Beauty
1 story
A curse at a christening and a forbidden spindle put a princess to sleep, and the whole household sleeps with her. The hedge grows, the years pass, and in the older versions the waking is only the middle of the story.
ATU 425A, The Animal as Bridegroom
5 stories
A husband is a beast by day and a man by night, and he is lost the moment his wife looks at him. The type is one branch of 425, The Search for the Lost Husband, and what follows is her journey east of the sun to get him back.
A father takes a rose he was not offered and owes a daughter for it. She goes willingly, learns the beast by living with him, and the enchantment breaks on her returning to him rather than on her being rescued.
The wife who has lost her husband does not walk out iron shoes looking for him. She keeps an inn and gathers travellers' stories until one of them is about him. The type is one branch of 425, The Search for the Lost Husband.
Sisters shelter a bear through the winter and keep rescuing an ungrateful dwarf from his own beard. The two strands turn out to be one story, and the bear was never a bear.
ATU 432, The Prince as Bird
1 story
A suitor who has been rejected or thwarted is cursed to spend a term as a bird. In that shape he courts the heroine at her window each night, is wounded by a trap her enemies lay, and is restored to human form once the deception against them both comes out.
ATU 433B, King Lindorm
1 story
A childless queen is given a charm, takes it wrongly, and her first-born comes out a serpent, who is thrown away and grows up unknown. Years later he blocks the road and will let nobody else marry until he has a mate, and every bride given to him is dead by morning. The girl who ends it wears one shift for each of his skins and makes him undress first.
A prince is under a spell that gives him an animal's shape, usually a hedgehog or a pig, and his bride has to endure it. The skin comes off at night, and burning it is done at somebody's peril.
Children flee a cruel home, and the brother drinks from an enchanted stream and becomes a deer. The sister keeps him, is married, is murdered or supplanted, and the two are restored together.
Brothers are turned into birds by an accident or a curse, and their sister breaks the spell by sewing shirts for years in total silence. She is nearly burnt for the silence before the last shirt is finished.
Two girls meet the same test at a well, an oven or an old woman's house. One is courteous and is rewarded past reason; the other copies her without the courtesy and gets the exact inverse.
A helper spins the impossible in exchange for a child, and the bargain can only be undone by saying his name. The name is overheard by luck, in the woods, at the last hour.
ATU 502, The Wild Man as Helper
2 stories
A captive wild man is freed by a prince, who is exiled for it. The wild man repays him in disguise, three times, at the moments he is most in need.
ATU 510A, Persecuted Heroine
3 stories
A daughter is reduced to the hearth by a stepmother, helped to a feast three times, and identified afterwards by something she left behind that fits nobody else. Cinderella is the best-known telling.
ATU 516, Faithful John
2 stories
A servant overhears the fate awaiting his master, prevents it silently at every turn, and is turned to stone for explaining himself. He is brought back at a price the master pays himself.
Three sons are set to keep watch at their father's grave, and the youngest, who keeps it, wins the horses. He rides up a glass mountain nobody else can climb, three times, and is not recognised until he chooses to be.
ATU 531, The Clever Horse
2 stories
A hero has a talking horse who advises against every piece of luck he finds and is right every time. The tasks grow worse, the horse's counsel gets him through them, and the horse is often the last thing restored.
A princess is forced to change places with her maid on the road, and her horse knows it and says so. Even beheaded, the horse's head goes on telling the truth until somebody in authority listens.
ATU 545B, Puss in Boots
2 stories
A cat is inherited instead of a fortune, and he talks his master into a title, a castle and a marriage by a series of confident lies. The ogre is beaten by flattery rather than force.
Sisters are married to animals who are lords in another shape, and their brother visits each in turn. Their husbands' powers are what he needs later, when his own wife is taken.
A traveller helps animals nobody else would trouble with, and each of them repays him by doing a thing no person could do. The repayment comes when he is under sentence of death and has been set tasks nobody could finish.
ATU 560, The Magic Ring
2 stories
A poor or foolish youth spares an animal from death and is rewarded with a wishing object. His fortune is stolen by a faithless wife, and the grateful animals he saved earlier, usually a cat and a dog, cross water to recover it for him.
ATU 561, Aladdin
1 story
A poor boy is sent down into an underground chamber for a lamp worth more than everything else in it. He loses it to a trick and has to win it back from another country, with the ring he was allowed to keep.
ATU 565, The Magic Mill
1 story
A mill grinds whatever it is asked for and cannot be told to stop by anyone who did not learn the words. The mill is why the sea is salt.
Something growing wild turns whoever eats it into a beast, and something growing beside it turns them back. The hero finds both by accident, carries one of each away, and uses them to get his own property returned.
Whoever swallows a certain bird's heart wakes each morning with gold under the pillow. The heart can be taken back out again, and the story is about the fortune changing hands with it.
ATU 571, All Stick Together
1 story
A golden bird, a goose or some other prize sticks to anyone who touches it, and a procession of stuck people follows. The parade exists to make a princess who has never laughed do it.
ATU 613, Truth and Falsehood
1 story
Two travellers fall out, and the one in the wrong maims the other and leaves him where he lies. The maimed man rests under a place where creatures talk over his head, hears what will heal him, and walks back into the world sound.
ATU 709, Snow White
1 story
A stepmother asks a mirror the wrong question, a huntsman disobeys her, and seven miners take the girl into their house in the wood. The stepmother makes three attempts on her life, and the last of them nearly works.
ATU 715, Half-Chick
2 stories
Half a chicken sets off to see the king and is rude to everything helpful on the way. Each thing he refused turns up again at the moment it could have saved him.
A ruler hides an animal's ears and puts to death the servants who see them, until one of them keeps the secret and cannot hold it. He whispers it into a hole in the ground, and a reed or a tree grown from that spot is cut into a pipe that will play nothing but the words he buried.
ATU 812, The Devil's Riddle
1 story
A bargain with the devil runs for a set term and ends in a riddle, and the contract is void if the riddle is answered. Nobody works the answer out. Somebody the devil's own household has hidden overhears it from the devil himself.
ATU 888, The Faithful Wife
1 story
A husband is taken captive far from home and sends word that he cannot be ransomed. His wife goes after him herself in disguise, wins his gaoler over by a skill of her own, asks for one prisoner as her whole reward, and brings him home without ever telling him who she is.
ATU 954, The Forty Thieves
1 story
A cave opens on a spoken word, and a poor brother who uses it carefully has a rich brother who cannot remember the word. The second half is entirely the work of a servant nobody has been paying attention to.
Three wives bet on which of them can play the greatest trick on her husband, and each takes a turn. Every husband is fooled by being told something about himself that he has no way to check, and the last trick runs into the one before it in front of the neighbours.
ATU 1525A, Tasks for a Thief
1 story
A master thief is set three thefts he cannot possibly manage, each guarded more heavily than the last. He manages all three, and the story admires the method far more than it disapproves of the man.
A swindler sells a cloth that only the worthy can see, and everyone who cannot see it says that they can. The oldest recorded version is Spanish, from 1335, where the cloth is invisible to any man who is not his father's son; Andersen read it in German translation and moved the test from paternity to fitness for office.
ATU 1640, The Brave Tailor
2 stories
A tailor kills seven flies at one blow, embroiders the number on a belt without saying seven what, and is taken for a hero. Every task that follows is survived by accident and read as skill.