Berezkin Analytical Catalogue · Motif
L81B — The hero's severed legs.
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 hero's rivals abandon him, cutting off his legs (usually leaving a sword at the entrance to his tent, and when the hero rushes out, the blade wounds him).
Berezkin category: Adventures: Monsters and evil spirits
This is of motif type Adventures and tricks and is part of group 10, Adventures.
L81 has 7 other sub-motifs
RelatedL81. A man who goes in search of fire finds it with a demon. The demon pursues the man, harms him, and kills him. Traditions in which there is only a story about men who are promised fire for a fairy tale (a tall tale) are marked with an asterisk*.
L81a. A girl offends a cat (rarely: a dog, a rooster) and the cat takes revenge by causing misfortune to befall the girl (usually by extinguishing the fire, after which the girl falls into the hands of a demon).
L81a1. Noticing a red bead (pebble) that has fallen into the hearth, the character thinks it is a coal and does not understand that the fire in the hearth has gone out.
L81a2. While the men are away, a demonic character comes to a girl or woman to drink her blood or otherwise torment her. The men notice that the girl is wasting away, but at first they do not know the reason.
L81a3. A girl sees a demon in a frightening and repulsive form. When he asks her what she said about him (what she saw), the girl replies that she praised his beauty and manners (she saw him in an attractive form). Usually, the girl eventually tells the truth, and the men hiding in ambush kill the enraged demon.
L81b. The hero's rivals abandon him, cutting off his legs (usually leaving a sword at the entrance to his tent, and when the hero rushes out, the blade wounds him).
L81c. The legless man lives together with the blind and armless man (or with one of the two). By working together, they are healed.
L81d. Two cripples with different physical disabilities quarrel and fight, and as a result become whole and healthy.
Top 10 motifs with similar dispersal patterns
Phylogeny| Motif | Similarity | Motif summary |
|---|---|---|
| L10A | 99.86% | A demonic character approaches a man's campfire. The man leaves a log in his place and hides. The character throws himself on the log, mistaking it for a sleeping man; usually, the hunter kills or wounds the demon. |
| M120C | 99.81% | Two animals agree to raise children together. One of them eats the other's children, continuing to pretend that the children are shared and that it does not matter which ones are missing. |
| I3A | 99.42% | During a thunderstorm, the character strikes with a whip â these are flashes of lightning. |
| B73A | 99.41% | A girl (a young man, a girl with her brother; two little brothers) searches for a lost horse, cow, sheep and, as a result (alone or with her brother; both brothers), turns into a bird (usually a cuckoo) with a characteristic call. |
| I87AC | 99.29% | Something huge gets into a person's eye, which he mistakes for a speck of dust. Usually, a bird carries away an animal or fish and drops a bone into the man's eye. It is difficult to find and remove (to do this, they get into a boat and float it inside the eye, throw a net into the eye, pull it out with oxen, etc.). |
| N20 | 99.24% | fairy tale text ends with a formula that says that the characters have achieved their desires, goals and/or happiness, or that God has fulfilled their wishes. |
| I87 | 99.19% | The characters use an object belonging to the world of giants (a skull, an animal shoulder blade, a mitten) as a shelter. Cf. I87C: animals use an object belonging to the world of humans (a skull, a mitten, a sieve, etc.) as a shelter. |
| M114A | 99.11% | The character is offered to sew clothes or shoes from stone or iron, or to remove the skin from the stone. |
| M199J | 99.07% | A giant puts a man on his shoulders to carry him across a river. Believing that the man is strong, he asks why he is so light. The man replies that if he puts all his weight on the giant, the giant will not be able to carry him. The giant pricks him with an awl (knife, nail) and asks him not to put all his weight on him again. |
| M199A | 99.06% | A man buried something soft and liquid in the ground, and when he stamped on it (shot an arrow into it) and the buried object splashed onto the surface, he said that he had squeezed the brain (innards) out of the earth. |
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
21 recordedThis motif has been recorded in 21 traditions: Romanians, Moldavians, Aromanians, Moldovans, Byelarusians, Belarusians, Uzbek, Yagnobi, Abaza (Abazins), Ossetians, Ingush, Avar, Andi, Akhvakh, Nogai, Tats, Armenians, Kalmyk, Kara Kalpak, Kazakh, Turkmen, Kazan (Middle Volga) Tatars, Bashkirs, Mordvins, Tuvinians of Tuva, Tuvans, Chechens, 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.