Folktale Motif Finder
Search a curated slice of the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index by keyword or category to find the recurring tale type behind a plot — and see which well-known stories share it.
30 matching tale types
A wily animal tricks a bigger animal out of a catch of fish, often by feigning death on the road and slipping away with the load while no one is watching.
Examples: The Fox and the Fish
An animal is tricked into fishing by dangling its tail through a hole in the ice, and loses part of it when the water freezes solid.
Examples: Why the Bear Has a Short Tail
One animal keeps slipping away from a shared chore, claiming to attend a godchild's christening, to secretly eat the group's stored food alone.
Examples: The Fox and the Wolf as Partners
A band of aging or mistreated farm animals sets off together to seek their fortune, and their combined racket frightens a band of robbers out of a house for the night.
Examples: The Town Musicians of Bremen
A trickster figure picks a fight with a sticky doll left as a trap, and becomes more and more stuck the harder it strikes back.
Examples: Br'er Rabbit and the Tar-Baby
A hero sets out to rescue a princess or village offered up to a monster, defeats it after an escalating series of battles, and must later prove the deed against a false claimant.
Examples: Saint George and the Dragon
A girl is shut away in a tower by a witch or sorceress, and is eventually found and freed by someone who reaches her using her own hair or voice.
Examples: Rapunzel
A couple flees a pursuing sorcerer or ogre, throwing down ordinary objects that transform into obstacles behind them — a comb into a forest, a mirror into a lake.
Examples: The Girl as Helper in the Hero's Flight
An apprentice learns a sorcerer's shape-shifting tricks and uses a chain of transformations to outwit and escape the pursuing master.
Examples: The Sorcerer's Apprentice
A girl sent on an errand through the woods is waylaid by a wolf that impersonates a relative to get close to her before she reaches her destination.
Examples: Little Red Riding Hood
A bride under enchantment appears in animal form until a spell is broken or a condition is kept, revealing her true shape.
Examples: The Frog Princess
A wife breaks a condition and loses her enchanted husband, then sets out on a long quest — often to the ends of the earth — to win him back.
Examples: East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Cupid and Psyche
A brother is transformed into an animal after drinking from an enchanted spring, and his sister cares for him until the spell can be undone.
Examples: Brother and Sister
Two girls — one courteous, one rude — are tested by strangers or spirits along the road, and rewarded or punished according to how they behaved.
Examples: Mother Hulda, Diamonds and Toads
A mistreated girl is helped by a magical benefactor to attend an event where she catches a prince's attention, then is identified afterward by a token she left behind.
Examples: Cinderella
A girl flees an unwanted marriage disguised in an animal-skin or wooden cloak, then reveals her identity at a series of gatherings using fine dresses hidden underneath.
Examples: Donkeyskin, Catskin
A clever animal helper tricks a series of people, and finally an ogre, into believing its poor master is a person of wealth and status.
Examples: Puss in Boots
A magical creature grants an escalating series of wishes until the final, greediest wish undoes every gain that came before it.
Examples: The Fisherman and His Wife
A tiny, sometimes thumb-sized hero survives a chain of misadventures — swallowed, carried off, or lost — through cleverness rather than size.
Examples: Tom Thumb, Issun-Bōshi
A murdered child is transformed into a bird that sings the truth of the crime to everyone it meets, eventually bringing justice and its own restoration.
Examples: The Juniper Tree
A supernatural visitor grants a poor but generous household a small number of wishes, set against a greedier household that squanders the same chance.
Examples: The Three Wishes
A disguised holy visitor rewards a household for the hospitality it showed a stranger, while an inhospitable neighbor is left worse off.
Examples: Baucis and Philemon
A low-born girl answers a series of impossible riddles or tasks set by a king or lord, winning status through wit rather than magic.
Examples: The Peasant's Wise Daughter
A proud noblewoman who mocked her suitors is married off to a disguised commoner and learns humility through hardship before the truth is revealed.
Examples: King Thrushbeard
A servant strikes a wager with an ogre or master over who loses their temper first, and wins through a string of outrageous but technically permitted acts.
Examples: numskull-ogre bargain tales
A peasant tricks an ogre or giant into always taking the useless half of a harvest — the roots one season, the tops the next — by choosing last.
Examples: Top and Root
A poor trickster turns a chain of small deceptions against a wealthier neighbor into escalating profit, usually at the rich peasant's expense.
Examples: Little Claus and Big Claus
A tailor boasts of killing 'seven at one blow' — flies, not men — and rides the resulting reputation into a series of ogre- and army-fooling triumphs.
Examples: The Valiant Little Tailor
A cumulative chain tale in which one helper after another is called on to make a stubborn animal or object move, each new helper needed to compel the last.
Examples: The Goat Who Would Not Go Home
A baked good escapes the oven and outruns a chain of pursuers who boast of catching it, until a final, cleverer pursuer finally does.
Examples: The Gingerbread Man, The Runaway Pancake
Why tale types matter
Long before folklorists had a shared vocabulary, storytellers everywhere kept independently arriving at the same handful of shapes — a youngest child who succeeds where older siblings fail, a bargain with a supernatural being that goes wrong on its final term, a disguise that a series of encounters slowly strips away. The ATU Index exists to name and number those shapes so a version collected in one country can be recognized as kin to a version collected somewhere entirely different.
Each entry below gives the ATU number, a plain-language summary of the recurring pattern, and a few well-known tales that fall under it — a quick way to see a familiar story as one instance of a much older, well-traveled shape.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index?
It's the standard reference system folklorists use to classify folktales by their recurring plot pattern — a "tale type" — rather than by the language or country a version happens to be recorded in. The same tale type, like a persecuted stepdaughter helped by a magical benefactor, turns up under different names across dozens of cultures.
What do the seven categories mean?
They're the index's top-level divisions: Animal Tales, Tales of Magic, Religious Tales, Realistic Tales, Tales of the Stupid Ogre, Anecdotes and Jokes, and Formula Tales. Each covers a numbered range — Tales of Magic, for instance, runs from ATU 300 to 749, and includes most of what people think of as classic fairy tales.
Is this the complete index?
No — the full ATU Index runs to well over two thousand tale types. This finder is a curated selection of well-known types across all seven categories, meant as a study and writing aid. For serious research, the standard reference is Hans-Jörg Uther's 2004 revision, "The Types of International Folktales."
How can I use this for my own writing?
Motif and tale-type indexes are a classic tool for finding fresh angles on a familiar shape — knowing that "Cinderella" and dozens of other tales share the same ATU 510A skeleton (mistreated protagonist, magical help, a recognition token) can help you spot which parts of a shape are load-bearing and which parts are free to reinvent.
Study and writing aid only. Summaries paraphrase the general pattern a tale type describes, not any single text — for citation-grade research, consult the standard ATU reference directly.