Berezkin Analytical Catalogue · Motif
F87A — The snake wife and her children: transformation into birds.
Source data for narratives and traditions is drawn from Berezkin’s Analytical Catalogue. If you use this data, please acknowledge and link to it: Ю.Е. Березкин, Е.Н. Дувакин. Тематическая классификация и распределение фольклорно-мифологических мотивов по ареалам. Аналитический каталог.
Summary of motif
OverviewA snake crawls onto the clothes of a girl bathing, climbs down in exchange for a promise to marry him, and takes her to the underwater world. She is happy there and gives birth to children. Together with them, she visits her relatives. They call the snake out of the water and kill it. After that, the wife transforms her children and/or herself into birds.
Berezkin category: Gender and sex
This is of motif type Cosmology and etiology and is part of group 7, Etiology of plants and animals and of their peculiar features, particular animals as protagonists of cosmological stories, metamorphoses, weather and calendar.
F87 has 2 other sub-motifs
RelatedF87. The snake forces the girl to promise to marry him and takes her to the underwater world. She is happy there and gives birth to a son (or two sons) and a daughter. Together with her children, she returns to visit her relatives. They learn what words she must use to summon her husband from the water, summon him, and kill him. Seeing the bloody water, the snake's wife (rarely the snake himself) turns the children and herself into birds or trees.
F87a. A snake crawls onto the clothes of a girl bathing, climbs down in exchange for a promise to marry him, and takes her to the underwater world. She is happy there and gives birth to children. Together with them, she visits her relatives. They call the snake out of the water and kill it. After that, the wife transforms her children and/or herself into birds.
F87b. A snake crawls onto the clothes of a bathing girl, climbs down in exchange for a promise to marry him, and takes her to the underwater world. She is happy there and gives birth to children. Together with them, she visits her relatives. They call the snake out of the water and kill it. After that, the wife transforms her children and/or herself into plants.
Top 10 motifs with similar dispersal patterns
Phylogeny| Motif | Similarity | Motif summary |
|---|---|---|
| K85 | 100.00% | The antagonist owns the fastest horse. The hero obtains an even faster horse (usually the brother or sister of this horse), which is the only one that surpasses the antagonist's horse and usually orders the antagonist to throw off his rider. |
| L110C | 100.00% | An elderly couple makes a child out of clay (wood, straw, dough). The doll comes to life and eats everyone it sees. Usually a goat (ram) breaks it, and those who have been swallowed come out alive. |
| K27Q1 | 99.99% | The hero is sent to bring lioness milk in a wineskin made from a lion skin (usually from a lion cub's skin). |
| K2A3 | 99.94% | The hero's companions leave him on the mountain, destroying the rope (chain) by which he climbed up or which he lowered down. |
| B33G | 99.91% | Horsemen or horses represent celestial bodies or different periods of the day. |
| I47A | 99.91% | The rainbow is associated with the wedding of a fox or jackal. |
| I87F | 99.91% | Before modern humans, there lived others who differed in strength, height, nobility, or other qualities. They disappeared after committing suicide. |
| K181A | 99.91% | When a person puts their hand on a horse's back, it bends over and falls. This is a sign of heroic strength. |
| K73B7 | 99.91% | The hero saves the magical wife from her enemy at a time when both the future wife and the enemy have zoomorphic appearances. Later, the rescued woman becomes a woman. |
| L108G | 99.91% | The character is black and must sit in water until he turns white. The antagonist carries him away. |
See the 100 most similar distributions →
Map of motif dispersal
DistributionDrag the map to pan, use the scroll wheel to zoom — choose a texture or projection below
Traditions
12 recordedThis motif has been recorded in 12 traditions: Vepsians, Western Ukrainians, Byelarusians, Belarusians, Karachays, Balkar, Tats, Kazakh, Kazan (Middle Volga) Tatars, Mari (Cheremis), Chuvash, Eastern Ukrainians, Northern Ukrainians, Russian Federation
If you wish to get access to data for projects and research, then please contact us, we do our best to help
How to cite: Fielder-White, J. (2026). The Folklore Database. https://folkloredatabase.com
0009-0006-1672-4451
Where applicable, users should also cite the relevant original sources, catalogues, and classification systems, including Berezkin, ATU, Thompson, and other cited authorities, alongside the page accessed and the last time accessed.
Editorial annotations and database enhancements Š Jonathan Fielder-White licensed under CC BY 4.0. Berezkin-derived narrative and metadata licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Full rights information can be found here.
All rights are reserved in the database structure, selection, arrangement, metadata, classifications, software, interface design, and original editorial content.
Important: The Folklore Database expressly reserves all rights in relation to text and data mining, automated extraction, scraping, machine learning, dataset creation, and the training, development, validation, or improvement of artificial intelligence technologies or systems. No part of this website or database may be scraped, copied, reproduced, harvested, downloaded in bulk, or otherwise used for AI training or commercial data extraction without prior written permission.
Designed and Developed by Jon Fielder-White.
Š 2024â2026 Crecganford / Jonathan Fielder-White. All rights reserved.