Berezkin Analytical Catalogue · Motif
J51B — A piece is missing: the reborn moon.
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
OverviewThe moon has been eaten or has died and its body has decomposed. It is revived, but a small part (the bone) is missing. This determines the characteristics of the moon or the characteristics of human anatomy.
Berezkin category: Avenger heroes: The amerinday cycle
This is of motif type Cosmology and etiology and is part of group 1, Sun and Moon.
J51 has 4 other sub-motifs
RelatedJ51. The character is dismembered or eaten; he is revived from his remains, but since one of his bones was broken, swallowed or carried away (or a drop of blood or a piece of flesh was lost), the revival fails, or the character remains defective in some way.
J51a. To climb a rock or tower, one must stick bones into it and climb them like a ladder.
J51a1. To retrieve an object from a hard-to-reach place, the girl orders it to be dismembered (or just have its fingers cut off) and then reassembled, after which it comes back to life.
J51a2. A girl must penetrate an inaccessible place with the help of chicken bones. She loses one or there are not enough bones. By cutting off her finger and using it as she would use the bones, the girl achieves her goal.
J51b. The moon has been eaten or has died and its body has decomposed. It is revived, but a small part (the bone) is missing. This determines the characteristics of the moon or the characteristics of human anatomy.
Top 10 motifs with similar dispersal patterns
Phylogeny| Motif | Similarity | Motif summary |
|---|---|---|
| A10 | 100.00% | The sun gets its sparkling eyes (eye) from an animal. |
| A11C | 100.00% | The Sun and Moon kill a monster whose eyes shine differently. At first, the Moon takes the brighter eye, but then swaps with the Sun. |
| B23 | 100.00% | The deity forbids the use of fire for cooking and punishes those who violate the prohibition. |
| B39 | 100.00% | An insect or character, which later turns into an insect, knows where food (cultivated plants) or water is located, but refuses to share this knowledge. To find the valuables (usually to force the insect to reveal its secret), the first ancestors pull on a rope tied around the character's waist (the origin of the bridge between the abdominal and thoracic sections of insects). |
| G12 | 100.00% | A huge tree bearing various fruits and/or containing water in its trunk grows out of a human body or is a transformed human being. |
| G27 | 100.00% | Cultivated plants appear together with urine or in the place where the hero urinated. |
| J12A | 100.00% | A girl or two sisters come to an old woman who invites them to marry her son. In reality, he is a worm, a snake or a penis, which his mother hides in a vessel during the day. The girl (sisters) do not allow him to approach them and run away. See motif J12. |
| J33A | 100.00% | A boy, a young man, or two children live in an old woman's house. They kill her husband—a man or a large animal—and make a scarecrow out of him. Angry that her husband is not responding to her, the old woman beats the scarecrow and then discovers that her husband has been killed. See motif J33. |
| G3 | 99.75% | Cultivated plants or fertile soil for their cultivation are hidden inside the rock. Birds or thunder gods pierce a hole in the rock. |
| G16 | 99.41% | Ants are the first to find cultivated plants that are unknown to others and concentrated in one place. |
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
4 recordedThis motif has been recorded in 4 traditions: Ngbakka, Mbum (incl Mbai), Mundang, Fali, Tupuri, Maya (=Bali), Nyong, Barasana, Taibano, Macuna, Desana, Siriano; Tatuyo, Bara, Tuyuca, Letuama, Tanimuca, Ufaina, Yahuna
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 © 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.
© 2024–2026 Crecganford / Jonathan Fielder-White. All rights reserved.