Berezkin Analytical Catalogue · Motif
K81A — Bezrucha in the prince's garden.
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 girl with severed hands comes to a fruit tree (garden) to find food. Seeing her there, the prince takes her as his wife.
Berezkin category: Adventures: Acts of heroes
This is of motif type Adventures and tricks and is part of group 10, Adventures.
K81 has 1 other sub-motifs
RelatedK81. For a minor offence or on false charges, a young woman is maimed and expelled from her home (rarely: she is killed or maims herself). The cripple miraculously recovers (the dead woman is resurrected).
K81a. A girl with severed hands comes to a fruit tree (garden) to find food. Seeing her there, the prince takes her as his wife.
Top 10 motifs with similar dispersal patterns
Phylogeny| Motif | Similarity | Motif summary |
|---|---|---|
| K27G4 | 99.65% | The character must complete all field work in an unimaginably short time and present the products of the new harvest. |
| K56A4C | 99.61% | A person is tasked with washing something black until it is white or something white until it is black (yarn, clothing, a board, etc.). |
| K56A6 | 99.57% | On the way to another world, people or objects ask a child (girl) to taste the food they offer or to do some work. The child (girl) does everything (rarely does not do) and therefore achieves the goal. |
| K107D1 | 99.45% | Waiting for his magical wife, the young man falls asleep. The wife cannot wake him up and leaves (this episode is often repeated). |
| M26A | 99.44% | The character catches birds by feeding them bait tied to a rope, which they swallow one by one, or by shooting several birds with one bullet, or by soldering birds drunk and tying up. Birds usually take off and carry away a catcher holding a rope. |
| B102A | 99.40% | Clouds are associated with horned cattle, especially cows (and rain is their milk). |
| M136B | 99.34% | A man cuts the branch he is sitting on and similar variants (cuts the rope he climbed up on; climbs onto a dry branch that breaks; climbs onto a tree that has been cut down in order to fell it). |
| M90A5 | 99.33% | The story mentions the golden fruits (rarely leaves) of a tree, usually golden apples. |
| L100F1 | 99.30% | A worker (the young son of the master) arranges things so that the food prepared by the mistress for her lover, who is working in the field, goes to the master, and when the master goes to the man, not knowing that he is his wife's lover, the man thinks that the husband is coming to kill him and flees. |
| M199I | 99.30% | A man and a giant (devil, bear, etc.) compete to see who can make the loudest sound (whistle, shout, sneeze, etc.). The man blindfolds his opponent and hits him with a heavy object; blows a trumpet; wraps his head so that it does not burst; etc. The opponent admits defeat or refuses to compete. |
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
18 recordedThis motif has been recorded in 18 traditions: Koreans, Maltese, France, Germans: North (Low- and Central German dialects): Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg, Pommern, Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony, incl East Frisia and Oldenburg), Nordrhein-Westfalen, Hessen, Rheinland-Pfalz, Thüringen, Saxony-Anhalt, Sachsen, Brandenburg, Rügen, Slovakians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Slovenians, Slovenes, Romanians, Moldavians, Aromanians, Moldovans, Lithuanians, Latvians, Setu, Byelarusians, Belarusians, Uzbek, Tats, Armenians, Kazan (Middle Volga) Tatars, Komi (Zyrians and Permyaks), 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 © 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.