Vladimir Propp in his book Morphology of the Folktale argues that Folktales because of their action based nature should be analyzed based on their actions. Typical analysis of Folktales to this point were done by comparison of motifs which were often descriptive and did not emphasize the action oriented nature of Folktales. While both of these methods of Fairy tale comparison have their drawbacks, they are both very useful when anaysizing various versions of a similar tale. In this book Propp assigns specific numbers and letters for each action to make a sort of equation to describe each and every tale. The difficult then arises when trying to decided which action is which letter. Each reviewer might come up with a different equation even though Propp seems to think this would be a fool proof system. To avoid this problem, but to use Propp's very useful concept of analyzing fairy tales based on action, I here will provide a simple break down of the action or morphology of the tale The Three Sisters by the Brothers Grimm. I will write out the actions instead of the using Propp's letter system in order to avoid some of the inherent problems in trying to assign letters according to his system in the "correct way."
I. The first set of actions is repeated three times in secession. Once with the bear, then with the eagle, and finally with the whale.
-Father spends all of this money and family is in poverty
-Father goes into or near enchanted forest in search of food.
-Father is confronted by enchanted animal who threatens to kill him
-Father saves his life by promising one of his daughters as a bride to the animal
-Animal comes for his bride on some interval of seven
-Animal leaves riches and father is wealthy again
II. The second set of actions again repeats three times in succession as Reinald meets up with each of his sisters.
-Reinald goes into forest in search of his sisters
-Reinald encounters sister in their animal habitat
-Sister hides Reinald from her husband until Enchantment breaks
-Animal is transformed into man and enchanted castle appears where there is great feasting
-Brother-in-law gives Reinald three hairs, feather, and scales respectively and says if he rubs them the Brother-in-law will come to his aid
-Reinald continues his search
III. The section occurs only once.
-Reinald comes upon an enchanted castle and a Bull as gatekeeper.
-Reinald fights the Bull with the aid of his Brothers-in-law.
-Reinald gets key to the castle
-Reinald find the sleeping princess who is enchanted
-Reinald breaks the slate which is keeping the princess and her brother enchanted
-Reinald marries the princess
Based on Propp's system this tale basically has three moves, two of which are repeated three times.
To show how the various variants are more or less like the Grimms' version of the tale we have a Propp analysis for several other variants
The Tree that Reached Up to the Sky
This page was compiled by Michele Nichols