Storymath: how the familiar patterns of folktales are built
Mr. Brown, Hugh Bonneville’s character in the first Paddington movie, opens his bathroom door to a flood of Paddington’s making
Hello. This is Henry Brown. 32 Windsor Gardens.
I just need to add something to my home insurance policy.
Well, what it is, is we have a guest for the night, a bear, and I just needed some extra cover for any da... Yes, a bear.
No, a real one.
About three foot six.
Grizzly? Not particularly.
Mind you, I haven't seen him in the mornings.
(clears throat) So, how much would that be?
Mr. Brown on the phone with the insurance company pre-flood, Paddington, 2014
We’re often told that our lives are largely foreordained by mysterious forces outside our control. Economic trends. New technologies. Neverending wars and ever-rising global warming. What’s more, we constantly talk in terms of the odds of success–by being born in X generation, in Y ethnic/racial group, and choosing Z college major or career path, a given individual has exactly P possibility of living a secure and rewarding adult life. Our public discourse about what people can be sounds more like we’re all insurance actuaries with seer-like success rates.
It’s the stuff of comedy in the original Paddington movie when Hugh Bonneville’s character, Mr. Brown, gets on the phone just in time to insure his house against bear-related incidents—namely, Paddington’s chain of “facilities” disasters flooding the bathroom into the rest of the house—but it doesn’t feel that odd that an insurance company would have special policies for absurdist disasters. In our world where once-in-a-lifetime disasters happen every few years, an insurance company having “non-grizzly bear specific” policies tracks with the categories our life’s events are forced into. Unfortunately most of us have a lot less whimsy in our lives and homes than the Brown family.
Part of what storytelling is for, though, is getting through rough times. We may watch our heroes wrench themselves out of dire straits, but it’s more satisfying to experience an epic struggle than an easy win. It makes sense why we like an underdog story–they’re easy to insert ourselves into, address our real fears about being people in our world, and are fun to imagine. Who wouldn’t want to outsmart a witch, defend your family from an enemy, meet your one true love after years of hardship?
That said, our oldest cultural stories often don’t make much sense in our modern world. We can dream of being storybook characters, but outside of living through a Once Upon a Time, in a “fairytale characters ported forward in time to now” tv show scenario, we probably won’t live anything similar. The fairytale witch doesn’t get on the phone with her insurance company when Hansel and Gretel start eating her house—she drags them inside to cook and eat them instead. Imagine explaining “the children are eating my house” to State Farm!
But the bones of so many of our stories—traditional folktales and fairytales—are not absurd or surreal. They exist in a space-time called “once upon a time” which is generally “long ago” or “before recent memory,” but not in an alternate dimension of alien lifeforms. They’re still rooted in the lands they were born in, bear the stamps of those climates, from terrain to food to political history.
People are still people in folktales, even if they’re witches who eat children, brothers who become swans, or frogs who might be princes. It is in the plot, and the logic behind it, that we realize we’re in “once upon a time.” Figuring out the rules of that land, and how situations will resolve themselves, to me, requires a logic I’ll call storymath.
Storymath in folk-and-fairytales looks like this: these characters + this plot + these villains + this assistance (maybe magical) = the outcome at the end of the story. But how does this work when studying an actual story?
Monty Python and the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index
Sir Vladimir and the peasants confront the supposed witch, wearing a fake nose they forced on her, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Sir Vladimir: There are ways of telling whether she is a witch.
Peasant 1: Are there? Well then tell us! (tell us!)
Sir Vladimir: Tell me…what do you do with witches?
Peasant 3: Burn'em! Burn them up! (burn burn burn)
Sir Vladimir: What do you burn apart from witches?
Peasant 1: More witches! (Peasant 2 nudges Peasant 1)
(pause)
Peasant 3: Wood!
Sir Vladimir: So, why do witches burn?
(long pause)
Peasant 2: Cuz they're made of... wood?
Sir Vladimir: Gooood.
(Dialogue proceeds: wood floats, ducks float, if she weighs the same as a duck, she’s wood, if she’s wood, she’s a witch.)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975
Folktales can’t be reduced to the 1+1=2 kind of math, of course. But we can analyze their component parts in a systemic way, to take a page from Monty Python’s deeply flawed witch syllogisms (aka the clip by which good intro philosophy professors introduce symbolic logic). The logic in this part of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is laughable on purpose, but it does speak to how we think about the word. If this woman is like X other women, then we can conclude she’s [insert classification here]. Part of how we puzzle out the importance of various parts of a story—and how stories are or aren’t related—is by looking at how scholars group similar chains of events together.
The most famous folktale classification system works with what are called “tale types,” and is known as the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index. The University of Washington library research guide for folklore and mythology describes tale types as follows:
Tale types refer to recurring plot patterns in folk-tales. Motifs are the building blocks, repeated story-elements, within these plot-patterns. Tale type indexes classify tales and provide a concise description of the narrative plot. "When defining a tale type, a folklorist presents an outline of the main events of a number of narrative texts resembling each other. For example, the stories depicting the imprisonment of two children in a witch's or devil's house and their clever escape represent the tale type “The Children and the Ogre”; its main sequences of action are “arrival at ogre's house,” “the ogre deceived,” and “escape.” Tale type indexes allow researchers to "examine a certain narrative from a cross-cultural perspective."
Stories can also be grouped by motifs using the Stith Thompson Motif-Index of Folk Literature. Motifs are
the smallest elements or building block of folktales - the distinguishing ‘details out of which full-fledged narratives are composed.” Motives can include archetypes, creatures, objects, phenomena, themes, and more.
If you search one of the amazing folklore search engines that miraculously still exist for free in this age of internet enshittification, you will find tale groupings that sound like this: “Brothers who were turned into birds” (type 251), “The Grimm Brothers' Children's and Household Tales,” and “Japanese Fairy World.” Under each heading or on each dedicated page, you will then find lists of tales that meet the criteria for that tale type/creator/region.
But one of the biggest initial surprises for people who are mainly familiar with folktales through Disney is how many variations there are within one tale type. The French Cinderella has a fairy godmother and a glass slipper, the Italian has three fairies and a divining rod, and the Filipino version has a crab that becomes a tree that bestows golden slippers. But they are all recognizably Cinderella tales, because no matter what changes in how the story unfolds, it unfolds in a familiar pattern.
My question—the entire point of this post in fact—is what would have to change for a story to unfold a different way, to change its set pattern.
Since I recently retold Hansel and Gretel in a SoulCollage workshop (albeit in a mashup with Baba Yaga for Halloween), let’s use that tale type as an example.
Hansel and Gretel: An exercise in storymath
Are there rules about who triumphs in a folktale? If you turned one into a word problem, how would you solve for the answer? In the Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel, it looks like this:
2 absent parents + 2 children + alone in the woods + discovery of a magic food-house + 1 hungry witch + 1 very large oven = cooking the witch instead.
The key to this outcome, however, is in the nature of children: Gretel whining “I don’t know how to do that chore!”
[The witch] pushed poor Gretel outside to the oven, from which fiery flames were leaping. "Climb in," said the witch, "and see if it is hot enough to put the bread in yet." And when Gretel was inside, she intended to close the oven, and bake her, and eat her as well.
But Gretel saw what she had in mind, so she said, "I don't know how to do that. How can I get inside?"
"Stupid goose," said the old woman. The opening is big enough. See, I myself could get in." And she crawled up stuck her head into the oven.
Then Gretel gave her a shove, causing her to fall in. Then she closed the iron door and secured it with a bar. The old woman began to howl frightfully. But Gretel ran away, and the godless witch burned up miserably. Gretel ran straight to Hansel, unlocked his stall, and cried, "Hansel, we are saved. The old witch is dead."
Hansel and Gretel, Grimm’s Fairytales, 1857 edition
Side note: We never hear much about *why* witches eat children. Historically, some of it comes from the ways witches were grouped with Jews as political undesirables in the political propaganda of the time, and stories of evil villains like Jews or witches eating children stems from antisemitic blood libel tropes, where Jews were said to murder Christians to use their blood in rituals (aka very VERY not something we do, a lie that has caused a lot of murder).
But, with Hansel and Gretel in particular, it seems famine is another consideration. Historical records from Britain’s Great Famine of 1314-16 had people so desperate they ate the seeds they would otherwise plant, and there were rumors of some desperate souls turning to cannibalism. As Ben Johnson in Historic UK reports,
Parents who could no longer feed their families abandoned their children to fend for themselves. Indeed, the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel may have originated at this time. In the story, Hansel and Gretel have been abandoned in the woods by their parents during a time of famine. They are taken in by an old woman living in a cottage. The old woman starts to heat the oven, and the children realise she is planning to roast and eat them. Gretel manages to trick the old woman into opening the oven, and then pushes her in.
Lillian Stone of The Takeout cites additional chilling sources
In his book The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century, William Rosen recounts an Estonian tale from 1315 that claims "mothers were fed their children." Finally, the website All That's Interesting cites an Irish historian who wrote that people "were so destroyed by hunger that they extracted bodies of the dead from cemeteries and dug out the flesh from the skulls and ate it, and women ate their children out of hunger."
Look, in a time where anyone would even consider cannibalism, people are freaking out. In that circumstance, sending your kids away to the forest, instead of, you know, eating them, is a relief. Having them be devoured by an evil witch instead then becomes a tragedy no one can fully blame those parents for. Hansel and Gretel helped vent the terror that people facing famine felt.
But, if you live in a prosperous time of plenty, Hansel and Gretel can become a very different story.
There’s the breathing space to wonder:
What would happen if the children were fighting, and didn’t have each other’s backs? Would just one of them be eaten? Or perhaps both, at different times?
What if the witch hadn’t told the children the whole freaking plan? If they didn’t know Hansel was being fattened up for slaughter, and Gretel wasn’t being starved, would they have been as ready to fight back?
What if the witch’s house had magical animals who loved her? Would they have protected her? Or if they hated her, would the children have escaped faster?
What if eating the house meant Hansel and Gretel were bad, instead of just desperate? Might that set off a chain of magical events where they’re eaten, just to teach them (and future child-readers) a lesson?
Is it possible for the parents to change their minds, and come rescue the children? Or do they lose their power to change the story’s ending when they force the children out into a form of orphanhood?
Every time a small element changes, the whole balance of the tale shifts, and the projected outcome we expect in our world of insurance companies and calculable risk changes.
The “so what?” of storymath
In the end, folktales and fairytales are stories, right? Cultural stories that are mashed up and molded into new forms in every generation. So even if they’re not your cup of tea, they’re still valuable as ways to examine other societal stories we’re told, from fiction to history to politics to commerce. What are the common variables?
Characters: Protagonist v. antagonist
How powerful is each party?
How numerous?
Do they have help? Is the help magical?
Do they do villain monologues so their victims have time to plan?
Are their victims conscious or in a coma?
2. Outside assistance, magical or otherwise
Who has magic?
Where do they get their powers?
What sort of powers are they?
Does one side have a magical community behind them (like help from magic animals)? Do both sides have communities, so it’s more like a battle than a secret in the forest?
3. Timing
Who acts at just the right moment?
Who hesitates?
Who’s an optimist, who’s a pessimist, and which is closer to reality?
4. Skills
Who already has skills (being able to sew v. being flummoxed by spinning straw into gold)?
Whose skills best meet the moment?
Does any magic grant special powers at just the right moment?
5. Societal rules
Who is seen as more powerful?
Whose cause is most just?
Whose position makes us cringe?
Who is brave?
What value do children have? Do they need to act a certain way to survive?
How are old women perceived? Do they have any protection from a hostile society?
Are royalty involved and/or what class differences come into the conflict?
If we understand the dynamics of each of these five variables, then we can make any folktale our own. We can subvert the tropes of the well-worn story and craft something entirely new, just by tweaking a variable or two.
In folktales and fairytales, this often takes the form of fractured fairytales, where the villain of the original is given a voice, agency, motivation, and readers are drawn into seeing the original heroes as flawed, perhaps villainous themselves. But for every fractured fairytale like Wicked, where we get to know “the witch” as Elphaba, a person we root for, there are many more retellings that plant an entirely new plot point to twist the story about. Take Dealing with Dragons, a novel by Patricia Wrede where we meet a princess named Cimorene who would rather be a dragon-servant than marry a prince, or Spinning Silver, a novel by Naomi Novik, where main character Miryem puts herself in service of the in-universe Rumpelstiltskin to save her family, and is such a wild success she changes the political reality of her region. In the last few decades, our culture has embraced a multiplicity of retellings as interesting and valid.
And beyond folktales, in terms of cultural stories? We need look no further than the elections in the United States last night. No matter your politics, it is undeniable that the dominant cultural narrative pushed by the most influential media in this country for the last year is that President Donald Trump and his policies had a mandate following the 2024 election. In the wake of a Democratic sweep, and particularly the election of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, the will of the people has to be understood pretty differently, though it’s unclear if the media will change their tune, even when the voters have. (It would take a lot more than a single blog post to unpack all of that, and so, despite my erstwhile career in political philosophy, I send you to Lex McMenamin at the now-unfortunately-defanged Teen Vogue for more on Mamdani’s political storytelling.)
In the end, it feels enough in difficult times to say that, given the complicated and ever-changing storymath at play in society, in culture, in folktales, that we still have agency. We can write our own story, repurposing old stories until they fit our needs, our wants, our dreams–even our nightmares. So perhaps we can step back a little, from the insurance claims adjusters societally implanted in our minds, take a breath, and allow ourselves to wonder: what if?