Berezkin Analytical Catalogue · Motif
I20A — Heavenly giants.
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
OverviewAnthropomorphic inhabitants of the upper world â giants.
Berezkin category: Supernatural objects, objects and creatures
This is of motif type Cosmology and etiology and is part of group 8, Queer and monstrous beings, creatures, objects and loci, folk beliefs related to particular phenomena and objects.
I20 has 5 other sub-motifs
RelatedI20. The inhabitants of the underworld or the land on the horizon where the sky meets the earth are dwarves. See motif I14A.
I20a. Anthropomorphic inhabitants of the upper world â giants.
I20b. People in the upper world are different from those on earth and gird themselves below or above the waist.
I20c. Dwarves live in an underground world that partly resembles the earthly world. If dwarves and humans meet, it happens underground.
I20c1. Dwarves do not live deep underground, but inside hills, in rocks, in mines, etc., and usually come out from there onto the ground.
I20c2. The inhabitants of the land on the horizon (where the sky meets the earth) are dwarves.
Top 10 motifs with similar dispersal patterns
Phylogeny| Motif | Similarity | Motif summary |
|---|---|---|
| N4 | 96.25% | Fused ribs are a sign of heroic strength. {The motive was highlighted and the material was collected by Kostyantin Rahno}. |
| L125 | 95.30% | After meeting a beautiful woman, a man finds her in a situation where her inhuman nature is revealed. After that, the marriage falls apart. |
| N37 | 94.87% | The character is said to sleep under the sky (like a blanket). |
| M78F | 94.68% | When a woman falls asleep, a joker (usually a tiny boy) places an embryo or the entrails of an animal or something similar next to her to make the woman herself or others think she has a miscarriage or that her viscera has fallen out. |
| L95 | 94.67% | A person (usually a child or teenager) returns to a previous location for a forgotten item (often a toy) and finds a demon there, from which they struggle to escape. |
| L92 | 94.21% | A demon, a cannibal, chops down a tree or rock on top of which the hero has climbed. Another character offers the cannibal a rest and takes over the chopping, but only spoils his work or (among the Athapaskans) kills him as soon as the cannibal hands him his axe. (African variants are clearly borrowed from Eurasia). |
| I87A | 94.16% | A character of gigantic size turns out to be small in comparison with a character of even greater size, or the same character turns out to be small in some episodes and gigantic in others. |
| I12 | 94.11% | A tree, a pole with branches, rarely a smooth pole connects the tiers of the universe. The most distinct variants, according to which the tiers of the universe are strung on a tree, are marked in italics. |
| A23D | 94.02% | Animals argue about which of them should start the cycle of 12 months or years. The mouse wins the primacy. |
| I50A | 93.83% | A demon sequentially tears off the legs of an animal that helps the hero (usually the horse on which the hero rides). |
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
8 recordedThis motif has been recorded in 8 traditions: Miao (Hmong) and Yao of Southern China, Estonians, Kazakh, Udmurt, Southern Selkups, Northern Selkups, Nivkh, Colorado (Tsachila)
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