64 motifs match “doing”  ·  back to the chapters

• Moon's phases as punishment for moon's misdoing. A755.6
• Magpie tells man he is to die next day: no tongue and long tail. God pulls out his tongue and makes his tail long for doing this forbidden thing. (Cf. A2344.2.6, A2378.3.1.) A2236.4
• Tabu: doing deed of mercy or courtesy. C740
• Tabu: doing thing at certain time. C751
• Tabu: doing thing at sunrise. C751.7
• Tabu: doing thing after certain time. C752
• Tabu: doing thing after sunset (nightfall). C752.1
• Tabu: doing certain thing after sunrise. C752.2
• Tabu: doing thing during certain time. C755
• Tabu: doing thing before certain time. C756
• Tabu: doing thing too soon. C757
• Tabu: doing thing too hastily. C758
• Tabu: doing thing too long. C761
• Tabu: doing thing too often. C762
• Tabu: doing thing in certain manner. (Cf. C643, D1791.) C854
• Disenchantment by reversing (undoing) enchantment. D765
• Magic repetition. Person must keep on doing or saying thing until released. D2172.1
• Devils appear to knight to try to call him from doing penance. G303.9.4.5
• Great head as ogre. Head detached from body pursues or flies about doing damage. G361.2
• King: What is your father doing? Youth: He is in the vineyard and is doing good and bad. (He prunes vines and sometimes cuts good and sometimes lets bad ones stay.) H583.2
• King: What is your father doing? Youth: Makes an evil greater. (Closes up a path; this causes another to be opened.) H583.2.1
• King: What is your father doing? Youth: Makes many out of few. (Sows grain.) H583.2.2
• King: What is your father doing? Youth: Makes better from good. (Hedges his field.) H583.2.3
• King: What is your father doing? Youth: Cuts wood which was burnt last year. (To pay old debts.) H583.2.4
• King: What is your father doing? Youth: He fences thorns with thorns. (Eggplant garden fenced with thorns.) H583.2.5
• King: What is your brother doing? Youth: He hunts; he throws away what he catches and what he does not catch he carries with him. (Hunts for lice on his body.) H583.3
• King: What is your brother doing? Youth: He runs back and forth. (Plows.) H583.3.1
• King: What is your brother doing? Youth: He sits between heaven and earth. (In a tree.) H583.3.2
• King: What is your mother doing? Youth: She does for another what the latter cannot do for her. (Lays out a corpse.) H583.4
• King: What is your mother doing? Youth: She shows the light of the world to one who has not yet seen it. (Assists at a birth.) H583.4.1
• King: What is your mother doing? Youth: She is baking the bread we ate last week. (To pay back borrowed bread.) (Cf. H583.2.4.) H583.4.2
• King: What is your mother doing? Youth: She cuts off the heads of the well to cure the sick. (Kills chickens to feed her sick mother.) H583.4.3
• King: What is your mother doing? Youth: She drives away the hungry and compels the filled to eat. (Drives away the hungry hens and stuffs the geese.) H583.4.4
• King: What are your mother and father doing? Girl: Mother is separating earth (being a midwife), and father is mixing earth (at a funeral). H583.4.5
• King: What is your mother doing? Girl: She has gone to turn one into two (to split peas). H583.4.6
• King: What is your sister doing? Youth: She is mourning last year's laughter. (Nurses child, the fruit of last year's love affair.) H583.5
• King: What are you doing? Youth: I boil those which come and go. (Beans which keep rising and falling in water.) H583.6
• Riddle: what six things are not worth doing? (Sowing salt, mowing pebbles, drinking from an empty jug, making signs to a blind man, wooing at mealtime, playing a harp in a mill.) H871
• Question (on quest): How can ants secure longer life? (Answer: by doing without wings.) H1292.11
• Picking up water thrown on ground no harder than the undoing of slander. J84
• Wit interprets unfavorable decision of court as doing him great honor. J835
• Thirty years old for twelve years. Man claims to be thirty; has been doing so for the last twelve years. J1218
• Hungry shepherd attracts attention. He tells of a cow with four teats who bore five calves. They ask what the fifth calf does while the other four are nursing. "It looks on just as I am doing now." J1341.6
• The double fool. A numskull caught changing meal from others' sacks into his own. Miller asks him what he is doing. "I am a fool." "Why then don't you put your meal into their sacks?" "I am only a simple fool. If I did that I should be a double fool." J1393
• Wise and foolish wish: keep doing all day what you begin. One begins pulling linen out of a box; other in anger begins throwing water on the pig and must do so all day. J2073.1
• Wise and foolish wish: help in whatever one is doing. One gets help in work, other in striking his wife (etc.). J2073.1.1
• Taking the short-cut. Farmer takes a few feet off his journey and lifts a wheelbarrow over 22 stiles in so doing. J2119.2.1
• Anticipatory whipping. A schoolmaster whips his pupils to keep them from wrong-doing. He does not wait until after the deed is done. J2175.1
• Fools reprove each other for speaking at prayers. They speak while doing so. J2254
• Sham revenant. A man takes refuge from robbers in an open grave. Robbers see him and ask what he is doing. "It is my grave. I went out to get a breath of air." J2311.3
• Breaking the glassware to prevent others from doing so. A king thus removes temptation from his subjects. J2522
• The devil gets into the ark. The devil wants to know what Noah is doing when he is building the ark. He forbids Noah's wife to enter the ark until Noah has also invited him. K485
• Briar-patch punishment for rabbit. By expressing horror of being thrown into the briar patch he induces his captor into doing so. He runs off. K581.2
• Wolf brings cake from the window-sill. He imitates the fox in so doing, but rings a bell, so that he is beaten. K1022.4
• Husband duped into doing penance while rascal enjoys the wife. K1514.2
• "Big 'Fraid and Little 'Fraid." Man decides to frighten another (or his son or servant). He dresses in a sheet; his pet monkey puts on a sheet and follows him. The person who is doing the scaring hears the victim say, "Run Big Fraid, run; Little Fraid'll get you." The scarer sees the monkey in the sheet, runs home. (Cf. K1833.) K1682.1
• Noah's secret betrayed by his wife. The devil persuades his wife to intoxicate him and then find out what he is doing (building the ark). K2213.4.2
• Man sells soul to devil for devil's doing one specific job. M211.8
• Doing penance till green leaves grow on a dry branch. Q521.1
• Outcast wife commits suicide when confronted with heads of relatives killed in revenge for her wrong-doing. S452
• Polygamy so that head wife may be quickly replaced for wrongdoing. T145.8
• Taming the shrew. By outdoing his wife in shrewishness the husband renders her obedient. T251.2
• Wife repays husband's supposed adultery by doing likewise. T257.7.1
• Sinful beauty is converted and spends the end of her life doing penance (Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt, and Thais). V229.12