Aarne Thompson's classifications. Index of folk tale plots

Information prohibited for distribution among children includes information:

1) encouraging children to commit actions that pose a threat to their life and (or) health, including causing harm to their health, suicide;

2) capable of causing in children a desire to use narcotic drugs, psychotropic and (or) intoxicating substances, tobacco products, alcoholic and alcohol-containing products, beer and drinks made on its basis, to take part in gambling, engage in prostitution, vagrancy or begging;

3) substantiating or justifying the admissibility of violence and (or) cruelty or encouraging violent actions towards people or animals, except for the cases provided for by this Federal Law;

4) denying family values and creating disrespect for parents and (or) other family members;

5) justifying illegal behavior;

*- Note Phacochoerus "a Funtik:
« There's actually a lot more great stuff out there when it comes to age restrictions. Did you know, for example, that books for children under 12 years old cannot contain mention of serious illnesses? Because this is the only way to raise real Buddhas who know no evil. Exactly»

Can anyone name at least one good children's book that does not violate this law? All these Carlsons, Moomintrolls, David Copperfields, Harry Potters, Huckleberry Finns, Timurs, Uncle Fedora and Winnie the Pooh do nothing but maliciously trample all his points.

They run away from home, wander around, quarrel with their aunts and stepfathers, fight, fly on umbrellas, run on rooftops and generally endlessly commit actions that pose a threat to their lives. Children can only read the scripts for Teletubbies, and the latter, if you think about it, sometimes lean too much on belly pancakes, clearly trying to harm their health through severe obesity.

In general, the monsters of consciousness surfaced to periscope depth.

(True, there is a loophole. New Bazhovs and Nosovs, of course, will not appear here as long as this law is in effect, but the old ones will still not be so driven off the shelves of children’s literature in stores and libraries. Because the law mentions in passing , that if a work has significant artistic and historical value, then so be it: smoke, drink and wander around the cemetery at night with a dead cat on a string.) And the funny thing is that, on the whole, this wonderful law did not raise any special objections from society.

The criticism that was heard in some places basically boiled down to the fact that, with children's sauce, they would close down websites and terrorize concerts intended for an adult audience.

And the fact that children can and should be protected from all sorts of horrors - here everyone seems to have long ago reached a consensus. For some reason, today it is believed that children are such nervous and gentle creatures that at the sight of an ant that has broken its leg, they will faint with compassion and will never, ever think of taking a magnifying glass out of their pocket and performing some interesting manipulations with the arthropod... We It’s somehow more pleasant to think that children are remarkably pure and wonderful creatures who would grow up to be unconditional angels if it weren’t for the evil and vicious people around us.

Alas, this wonderful view of the world has nothing to do with biological truths.

A child born into the world, although inclined towards altruism as a representative social type, but this tendency remains for the time being in a very passive state, because the first years of his life have completely different priorities on his agenda. Very, very far from the priorities of an elderly, complacent and well-mannered gentleman beginning of the XXI century.

The child knows nothing about humanism, unselfishness and the achievements of social progress, but he understands well that the right thing to do is to hit the enemy who is interfering with you in the head with a stone, and then laugh joyfully as he watches his teeth flow away with red liquid.

With age, children, stuffed to the ears with nannies' cooing about what is good and what is bad, become, of course, a little less natural. But for a very long time, most of them have such calm views on the nature of violence that modern inexperienced mothers now and then drink canisters of valerian, trying to understand why their beloved boys and girls do such things if no one taught them anything like that.

Children with their plastic psyche, which so easily forgets the bad, so flexibly adapts to the conditions of existence that are unbearable for an adult, can, of course, grow up on Teletubbies.

But this is not necessary for children, but for their parents, who have now put safety at the forefront as an absolute priority over any other human needs.

We can guess what children really love by looking carefully at folk tales, which have also gone through their evolutionary path. Only those who actually liked the children managed to survive, asking with trembling voices to tell them again about the evil witch who eats little boys.

"But the majority folk tales so sweet, kind and innocent!” - you say.

Well, of course. After they were thoroughly washed and castrated by all sorts of brothers Grimm and Charlie Perrault during the Age of Enlightenment, after they were finally finished off by Walt Disney - yes, they are very cute.

The original, uncut versions of these beloved fairy tales most often look completely, completely different.

Do you want to know how? We hope you have your canister of valerian on hand.

In the original, Little Red Riding Hood did not wear a cap at all, but a chaperon - a cape with a hood. At Perrault's she walked around in the chaperone. But in the German version of the Brothers Grimm, the girl was wearing a hat, which has also taken root with us. The first recording of this tale, made in Tyrol, dates back to the 14th century. It was widespread throughout Europe, and in the original it was told with the most curious details, which Perrault and the Grimms somehow forgot to mention.

The girl in the red raincoat actually chatted with the wolf on the way to her grandmother. And when she came to the house, the cunning animal had already managed not only to kill the grandmother, but also to cook her. The wolf in the grandmother’s cap and dress was cooking, the guest was invited to the table, and together they began to cheerfully eat the grandmother, who had delicious fatty meat. True, the grandmother’s cat tried to warn the girl about the undesirability of cannibalism. She spun around and sang a song:

The girl is chewing her grandmother
He gnaws his grandmother's bones.

But the wolf immediately kills the impudent cat with a well-aimed blow from a wooden shoe, to which Red Raincoat reacts very serenely. The girl strips naked, jumps into bed with her grandmother and begins to ask her difficult questions:

- Grandma, why do you have such broad shoulders?
- Grandma, why are your legs so long?
- Grandma, why is there so much fur on your chest?

The wolf honestly answers that this way it is more convenient for him to hug, catch up with, and warm his dear granddaughter. And when it comes to big teeth, the wolf can’t stand it and rips open his cute friend’s neck. Apparently, he didn’t have much fun with his grandmother at dinner.

And yes, it's over. No lumberjacks.

An ancient story about children lost in the forest has been found new life at the very beginning of the 14th century, during the Great Famine of 1315–1317. Three years of terrible harvests caused by prolonged frosts killed approximately 25 percent of the population of northern Europe. Cannibalism flourished in cities and villages. And it was here that Jeannot and Margot (or Hansel and Gretel in the German version) appeared.

There are many versions of the plot, but the most popular was that the father and mother, dying of hunger, decided to eat their children. The children, hearing their parents sharpening their knives, rushed into the forest to wait there until mom and dad died of hunger. On the way, the boy threw stones so as not to get lost. After sitting in the forest for some time, the children also began to languish from hunger and quietly crept back to the house. There they heard the conversation of their parents, who had obtained some bread somewhere and were now sad that there was bread for gravy, but the naughty meat dish had eluded them. The children stole a piece of bread and again went into the thicket. But now the boy marked the path with crumbs, which were immediately pecked by the birds, also mad with hunger. Having finished eating the bread, the children decided to die - and then they came to a house made of bread! And the windows were even lined with wheat cakes! Then everything goes along the track we are already familiar with. But in the end, the children happily return home, carrying with them not only bags of fresh bread, but also a well-fried witch. So now parents don't have to eat their children. Everyone is happy, everyone is hugging. Over time, the tale has changed. Hunger still remains as the main character, but parents now simply get rid of extra mouths to feed by taking their children to the forest. The house turns into a gingerbread house, because nowadays you can’t lure little listeners to the witch with bread, and the fried witch remains in the oven, never ending up on the family table.

In the Aarne-Thompson system of classification of fairy tales, Snow White is number 709. This is one of the famous stories of the folk storyteller Dorothea Wiemann, recorded by the Grimms and considerably softened by them, although the Grimm version will make Disney fans uncomfortable.

Well, first of all, Snow White, the queen’s stepdaughter, was also going to be eaten - how would they be without this in a fairy tale? The stepmother demanded that the servant, after strangling the annoying girl, bring her lungs and liver to the royal kitchen, which were served that same day at a cheerful dinner party in the castle (the offal turned out to be deer, because the girl bribed the servant with her beauty and youth). Snow White is captured by seven mountain spirits, who also like her beauty - so much that they decide to keep the girl with them. After Snow White's death from a poisoned apple, the coffin with her body is exhibited on the mountain, and there it is seen by the prince passing by.

Further, the Grimms write with some hesitation that the prince wanted to take the dead girl to him because she looked like she was alive and was very beautiful. Let's not think badly about the prince - maybe he, unlike Sleeping Beauty's lover (see below), was simply going to honestly and nobly expose her to local history museum. But while he is bargaining with the dwarves for the right to buy back the body, his servants drop the coffin, the dead girl falls, a piece of apple flies out of the girl’s mouth - and everyone is alive and happy. Well, except for the stepmother. Because they put red-hot iron shoes on the queen’s feet and forced her to dance on a burning brazier until she died.

Yeah. Of course, he kissed her... No, in the ancient versions of this super-popular plot, the first records of which date back to the 12th–13th centuries, everything happened differently. And half a century before Perrault, in the 30s of the 17th century, the plot was recorded in more detail by the Italian Count Giambattista Basile, another collector of folk tales.

Firstly, the king was married. Secondly, having discovered a girl sleeping in an abandoned castle in the forest, he did not limit himself to a kiss. After which the rapist hastily left, and the girl, without ever emerging from her coma, gave birth to twins in due time - a boy and a girl. The children crawled over their sleeping mother, sucked milk and somehow survived. And then the boy, who had lost his mother’s breast, began to suck his mother’s finger out of hunger and sucked out the damned splinter stuck there. The beauty woke up, found the children, reflected and prepared to starve to death in an empty castle. But the king passing by just remembered that last year he spent a very good time in these thickets, and decided to repeat the event. Having discovered the children, he behaved like honest man: began to visit and deliver food. But then his wife intervened. She slaughtered the children, fed their father their meat, and wanted to burn Sleeping Beauty at the stake. But then everything ended well. The queen became greedy and ordered the girl’s gold embroidered dress to be pulled off. The king, having admired the young naked beauty tied to a pole, decided that it would be more fun to send her to the stake old wife. And it turns out that the children were saved by the cook.

And here, in general, everything is extremely innocent. The only difference, consider the Disney plot from original version, recorded by the Grimms, is that Rapunzel and the prince did not run away anywhere. Yes, he climbed into the tower along its spit, but not at all with the goal of getting married. And Rapunzel wasn’t eager to go to the pampas either. She quickly set out for freedom when the witch noticed that the beauty’s corset stopped meeting at the waist. (In German villages, where many young ladies worked as maids in wealthy houses, this plot was not so fabulous.) The witch cut Rapunzel's hair, and the prince was left without eyes by the witch as punishment. But at the end of the fairy tale, everything grows back for them, when the prince, blindly wandering through the forest, came across his twin children, who were looking for food for the hungry and unhappy Rapunzel.

Charles Perrault worked especially diligently on the plot of the fairy tale “Cinderella,” carefully removing all the gloom and all the heavy mysticism from it. This is how fairies, princes of Mirliflora, crystal slippers, pumpkin carriages and other beauty appeared. But the Brothers Grimm recorded a version for folk storyteller Dorothea Wiemann that was much closer to the folk version of this tale.

In the folk version, Cinderella runs to ask for dresses for balls on the grave of her mother, who rises from the coffin to dress her daughter (the Grimms, after thinking about it, nevertheless replaced the zombie mother with a white bird that flew up to the grave with bundles in its teeth). After the balls, the girl runs away from the prince, who wants not so much to get married as to immediately reproduce. The girl climbs first onto a pear tree, then onto a dovecote. The prince cuts down all these hills with an ax, but Cinderella somehow manages to hide. At the third ball, the prince simply glues the nimble beauty to the stairs, filling her with resin. But Cinderella jumps out of her golden slippers and, covered in tar, runs away again, saving her honor.

Here the prince, completely crazy with passion, decides to lure the young lady with the promise of marriage. While Cinderella is wondering whether his words can be trusted, even if they were announced to the whole kingdom, the prince begins to walk around with the shoes. The older sister cuts off her toes to fit into her shoes, but she limps badly in them and loses them along the way. The younger sister cuts off her entire heel and walks quite smoothly, but the white doves reveal the deception to the prince and his retinue. While the sisters are bandaging the bloody stumps, Cinderella appears and, shaking the blood out of her shoes, puts them on.

Everyone is delighted, the prince and Cinderella are going to get married, and white doves peck out her sisters’ eyes because they forced Cinderella to clean the house and did not let her go to the ball. And now the sisters, blind and almost legless, crawl around the city and beg, thereby delighting the heart of Cinderella, who lives with a handsome prince in a cozy palace.

Most Popular Character Slavic fairy tales, whose name means Baba-Izva, has an extremely gloomy origin, and the description of her charming home was a sure way to scare the little Polyans, Drevlyans and other Krivichi to the point of hiccups. For even the youngest inhabitants of the Slavic lands, alas, knew well what a hut on chicken legs was. Until the 13th–14th centuries, and in some places even longer, right up to the 19th century, in our forest areas the dead were buried in domovinas - “death huts”. This was an excellent burial method for the tree-rich northern lands with their perpetually frozen ground. Several nearby trees were selected, they were cut down at a height of one and a half to two meters, the roots were cut and partially pulled out to protect the trunks from rot, and a small hut was erected at the top, where the corpse was placed along with the food and some belongings due to it. It was almost impossible for predators to get into such a hut, and they could stand for decades and centuries. Grandmother Ulcer, Old Woman Pestilence, and namely Death itself, of course, considered these houses as their rightful home. Her bone leg, which belonged to world of the dead, knocked menacingly on those who dared to poke closer to this guarded burial place. And all the Ivan Tsarevichs who came to visit her went through the rituals that were due to the dead: they were washed, ridding them of the “human spirit”, they were given food for the long journey and they were put to bed - for a long time.

Now we perceive the story about Mashenka, who visited three bears to try out their beds and bowls, as something originally ours. And here we are fundamentally wrong. It is “Three Bears” that is not even international wandering plot- This is a purely Scottish fairy tale, which has also entered English folklore.

Leo Tolstoy made it Russian. He translated this tale after reading it as performed by Robert Southey (Soutey's tale was published in 1837). In the original folklore version, their eternal enemy, foxes, came to the bears, and he was either forced to run away from the bears as fast as he could, or they still managed to remove his skin, on which the most a little bear then he loved to warm his paws, sitting in front of the fireplace. Robert Southey turned the main character into a little old woman. The old woman's fate remained unclear. This is how the ending of Southie's tale sounds:

“The old lady jumped from the window, and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the forest and got lost there, or got out of the forest safely, but was captured by a constable and sent to the house of correction as a tramp, I cannot say. But the three bears never saw her again.”

But our Lev Nikolayevich did not want to know any old women and made the heroine a little girl who successfully escaped from the horrors of the bear forest.

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In 2004, a revised and expanded index of fairy tale plots according to the Aarne system “Types of International Folk Tales” (Hans-Jorg Uther 2004: The Types of International Folktales. A Classification and Bibliography. Parts I-III. Helsinki.), compiled by Hans-Jorg Uther...

Hardly 40 years after the publication of the second revised edition of the international index fairy tale types, the need arose for the publication of a new edition of the fairy-tale catalog begun by Anti Aarne (1910) and Stith Thompson (1928, 1961). The method of describing and annotating types of tales used in this catalog provides useful information about the historical and modern folk epics of Europe, especially such genres as fables, tales of animals, legends, fables, humorous jokes And fairy tales-formulas. Of course, over the past decades, there has been a shift in the historical-comparative method of studying folk narratives, which has influenced the new edition of this catalogue. However, despite the renewed interest in new folk narrative genres, all oral and written forms in the world cannot be documented in the Aarne-Thompson system. There are many reasons for this, many of which stem from the fact that the index of tale types is structured by genre and organized by theme. Of course, the use of the term "fairy tale" (Märchen) as the international equivalent of "folk narrative" has led to the blurring of distinctions between narrative genres. The Brothers Grimm followed the same trend: they included in their Children's and Family Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen) etiological myths, fables, animal tales, cautionary tales, humorous anecdotes, legends, religious legends and various mixed forms such as religious jokes and humorous tales. Although from the history of the classification of fairy tales we see that all these genres find a suitable place in the index of types of fairy tales, there are other folk tales that are not included in its thematic sections. This includes, first of all, myths, epics, legends and etiological tales, short forms such as anecdotes, jokes, rumors and modern genres such as biographies, family stories etc. For such types of texts it is necessary to use an alternative classification system, such as the “Index folklore motifs" (1955-1958) (the Motif-Index of Folk Literature), as was done in the catalog of Johannes Wilbert and Karen Simoneau, who compiled an index of stories of a small Indian tribe in South America, in Walther Heissig's Index to Mongolian Epic and Rudiger Schott's Index to Eastern Ghanaian Stories.