Владимир Пропп [Vladimir Propp] (1928), Морфология сказки [Morphology of the Folktale], Leningrad: Academia (Вопросы поэтики XII), 151 pp. English: trans. Laurence Scott, Indiana University, 1958; 2nd ed., University of Texas Press, 1968 — https://lccn.loc.gov/75204576
Key takeaways
- The unit. In “the tsar gives the hero an eagle, which carries him to another kingdom” and “the old man gives Sučenko a horse, which carries him to another kingdom”, names and attributes vary and actions do not. A function is “an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action”; it is defined independently of who performs it and of how, and the same act can be two different functions according to its consequences (money given and then spent on a magic cat is not money given as a final reward).
- Four theses (ch. II): functions are the constant elements of the tale; their number is limited; their sequence is always the same; all wondertales are of one type in structure.
- The functions (ch. III): after an initial situation, 31 functions run from absentation, interdiction and violation, through villainy (A) or lack (a), mediation, departure, the donor’s test, the hero’s reaction and receipt of a magical agent, guidance, struggle and victory (or difficult task and solution), liquidation of the misfortune, return, pursuit and rescue, to recognition, exposure of the false hero, transfiguration, punishment and wedding. Many come in pairs; A or a is the one function every tale has.
- Seven roles (ch. VI): functions group into spheres of action of the villain, donor, helper, princess (sought-for person) and her father, dispatcher, hero and false hero. A sphere can match one character, one character can fill several, or one sphere can be split among several. Living beings, objects and qualities are morphologically equivalent as helpers.
- The whole tale (ch. IX): a tale is a move from villainy or lack to its resolution; texts can hold several moves. Struggle–victory and difficult task–solution almost never share a move (41 and 33 of 100 tales, together three times); when both occur in a two-move tale, the struggle comes first. All the tales fit one scheme with these two as alternative branches. Propp admits inversions and some displacements, and treats larger departures as humorous decomposition.
- What follows. Plot and variant cannot be distinguished; all wondertales form one chain of variants, derivable, he conjectures, from the tale of the dragon’s abduction of a princess. The teller is bound in the order of functions and in linked variants, free in omission, choice of realisation, naming and language; tales can be generated artificially from the scheme. The wondertale’s uniformity suggests, as a hypothesis for historians, that it is “in its morphological basis a myth”.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-09 from the manuscript bibliography of 2026-10-09 (work
what-survives-translation) at the owner’s request: the manuscript
considered it and dropped it from the final reference list. It is read here
on its own merits. See the curation entry of that day.
Read on 2026-10-09 (NOTE-615), in the 1928 Russian text. The reading is the source of THEORY-167. Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis of myth (LIT-775, filed, not read) is the later line this book is usually set against; Doja, Capocchi and Santucci (LIT-804) cite the English edition as one of the formalisations computational work has attempted.
The English translation, Morphology of the Folktale (trans. Laurence Scott, Indiana University, 1958; 2nd ed. revised by Louis A. Wagner, University of Texas Press, 1968), is filed as one entry for both editions, LIT-830 (2026-10-09). No lawful full text of either edition was reachable, so it is filed, not read, and the comparison of the translation with this reading waits on a copy.