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.
Type 15, Stealing the Partner's Butter. 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.
Type 151, Music Lessons for Wild Animals. 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.
Type 301, The Three Stolen Princesses. Princesses are carried underground; 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.
Type 306, The Danced-Out Shoes. Princesses whose shoes are worn through every night, and the soldier who follows them to find out where they go. Invisibility gets him there; the proof he brings back is what ends it.
Type 310, The Maiden in the Tower. A girl promised away before birth and shut in a tower with no stair, reached by her own hair. Discovery, exile and a long separation follow before the ending is allowed.
ATU 312, Bluebeard
1 story
Type 312, Bluebeard. A husband who gives his wife every key and forbids 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
Type 313, The Magic Flight. A hero in the power of a magician or ogre is helped by the captor's own daughter, and the two run for it, throwing objects behind them that become forest, mountain and lake. Often ends with a forgotten fiancee and a slow remembering.
Type 325, The Magician and His Pupil. 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 being the last transformation standing.
Type 326, The Youth Who Wanted to Learn What Fear Is. 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 domestic and very small.
ATU 327A, Hansel and Gretel
1 story
Type 327A, Hansel and Gretel. 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.
Type 327B, The Small Boy Defeats the Ogre. 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.
Type 328, The Boy Who Stole Ogre's Treasure. A boy returns again and again to a giant's house, taking something better each time, until the last theft is the giant himself. Nerve rather than strength, and the climb down is the dangerous part.
Type 333, Little Red Riding Hood. A girl sent through the wood to a relative's house, a wolf who arrives first, and the questions asked of a figure in a bed. The oldest tellings end there; later ones send in a rescuer.
Type 400, The Man on a Quest for the Lost Wife. A man wins a supernatural bride, breaks the one condition attached to her, and loses her. The tale is the journey back: worn shoes, three helpers, and a wedding he arrives at just in time to stop.
ATU 402, The Animal Bride
2 stories
Type 402, The Animal Bride. 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 is a woman by the time anyone looks properly.
Type 403, The Black and the White Bride. 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 the wrong bride cannot do what the right one could.
ATU 408, The Love for Three Oranges
2 stories
Type 408, The Love for Three Oranges. 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
Type 410, Sleeping Beauty. A christening curse, a forbidden spindle and a sleep that takes the whole household with it. The hedge grows, the years pass, and the waking is only the middle of the older versions.
ATU 425A, The Animal as Bridegroom
5 stories
Type 425A, The Animal as Bridegroom. A husband who is a beast by day, a man by night, and lost the moment his wife looks at him. A subtype of 425, The Search for the Lost Husband: what follows is her journey east of the sun to get him back.
Type 425C, Beauty and the Beast. 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 rather than on her being rescued.
Type 425D, Vanished Husband Learned of by Keeping Inn. A subtype of 425, The Search for the Lost Husband, in which the wife does not walk out iron shoes looking for him: she sits still and gathers stories until one of them is about him.
Type 426, The Two Girls, the Bear and the Dwarf. 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
Type 432, The Prince as Bird. A suitor 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 laid by her enemies, and is restored to human form once the truth of the deception against them both comes out.
ATU 433B, King Lindorm
1 story
Type 433B, King Lindorm. 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.
Type 441, In an Enchanted Skin. A prince under a spell that gives him an animal's shape, usually a hedgehog or a pig, and a bride who must endure it. The skin comes off at night and is burnt at somebody's peril.
Type 450, Little Brother and Little Sister. Children flee a cruel home; the brother drinks from an enchanted stream and becomes a deer. The sister keeps him, is married, is murdered or supplanted, and both are restored together.
Type 451, The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers. Brothers turned into birds by an accident or a curse, and the sister who breaks it by sewing shirts in total silence for years. She is nearly burnt for the silence before the last shirt is finished.
Type 480, The Kind and the Unkind Girls. 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.
Type 500, The Name of the Supernatural Helper. A helper who spins the impossible in exchange for a child, and a bargain that 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
The Wild Man as Helper: a captive wild man is freed by a prince, who is exiled for it, and who is repaid in disguise at the moment of need.
ATU 510A, Persecuted Heroine
3 stories
Type 510A, Persecuted Heroine. Cinderella: a daughter 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.
ATU 516, Faithful John
2 stories
Type 516, Faithful John. A servant who overhears the fate awaiting his master, prevents it silently at every turn, and is turned to stone for explaining. He is brought back at a price the master pays himself.
Type 530, The Princess on the Glass Mountain. A father's grave kept watch by three sons, and horses won by the youngest for keeping it. 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
Type 531, The Clever Horse. A hero with 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, and the horse is often the last thing restored.
Type 533, The Speaking Horsehead. A princess forced to change places with her maid on the road, and the horse who knew and said so. Even beheaded, the head goes on telling the truth until somebody in authority listens.
ATU 545B, Puss in Boots
2 stories
Type 545B, Puss in Boots. A cat inherited instead of a fortune, who 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.
Type 552, The Girls who Married Animals. Sisters married to animals who are lords in another shape, and a brother who visits each in turn. Their husbands' powers are what he needs later, when his own wife is taken.
Type 554, The Grateful Animals. 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
Type 560, The Magic Ring. 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
Type 561, Aladdin. A poor boy, an underground chamber and 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
Type 565, The Magic Mill. A mill that grinds whatever it is asked for and cannot be told to stop by anyone who did not learn the words. It is why the sea is salt.
Type 566. 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.
Type 567, The Magical Bird-Heart. Whoever swallows a certain bird's heart wakes each morning with gold under the pillow. The heart can be taken back out again, which is what these tales are about: it changes hands, and the luck goes with it.
ATU 571, All Stick Together
1 story
Type 571, All Stick Together. A golden bird, a goose or a similar prize that anyone who touches is stuck to, and the procession of stuck people that follows. The point of the parade is to make a princess who has never laughed do it.
ATU 613, Truth and Falsehood
1 story
Type 613, Truth and Falsehood. 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
Type 709, Snow White. A stepmother who asks a mirror the wrong question, a huntsman who disobeys, and a house in the wood where seven miners take her in. Three attempts on her life, the last of which nearly works.
ATU 715, Half-Chick
2 stories
Type 715, Half-Chick. A half-a-chicken who 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.
Type 782, Midas and the Donkey's Ears. 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
Type 812, The Devil's Riddle. A bargain with the devil runs for a set term and ends in a riddle: answer it and the contract is void. The answer is never worked out. It is overheard, from the devil himself, by somebody his own household has hidden.
ATU 888, The Faithful Wife
1 story
Type 888, The Faithful Wife. 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
Type 954, The Forty Thieves. A cave that opens on a spoken word, a poor brother who uses it carefully and a rich one who cannot remember it. The second half is entirely the work of a servant nobody has been paying attention to.
Type 1406, The Three Clever Wives Wager. 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
Type 1525A, Tasks for a Thief. A master thief set three thefts he cannot possibly manage, each guarded more heavily than the last. He manages all three, and the tale enjoys the method far more than it disapproves of the man.
Type 1620, The Emperor's New Clothes. 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
Type 1640, The Brave Tailor. 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.