Motif Drift: Differences Between Versions, Not Descent

This term grows out of the entry on the Aarne–Thompson–Uther index, which explains how folklorists number tale types and why a shared number does not prove a shared ancestor. Motif drift names what the comparison tables on Where Tales Began look at once versions of one type have been lined up.

Definition

Motif drift is a term used on Where Tales Began for a difference between recorded versions of the same tale type at the same point in the story. The Aarne–Thompson–Uther index is a catalogue that gives each recurring tale type a number; Cinderella is type ATU 510A. Versions filed under one number share a plot, but at any given point in that plot they can hold different things.

Two pairs show the idea. Ye Xian, written down before 863 by Duan Chengshi in the Youyang Zazu, loses a golden shoe; the heroine of Charles Perrault's "Cendrillon" (1697) loses a glass slipper. In Ye Xian the magic comes from the bones of a fish; in Perrault it comes from a fairy godmother. Each pair is one motif drift: the same place in the plot, filled differently in two dated texts. A third text differs again: in the Grimms' 1857 "Aschenputtel", the heroine plants a hazel twig on her mother's grave, and it grows into a tree.

The same comparison is used for the recorded versions of a single myth, which have no tale-type number. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter gives Persephone one pomegranate seed and Ovid's Metamorphoses gives her seven: one motif drift, set out in the entry on Persephone's pomegranate.

What the term does not claim

Motif drift describes difference only. Noting motif drift at the shoe records two versions with their dates: a golden shoe in a text written before 863, a glass slipper in one of 1697. It does not say that the glass slipper came from the golden shoe, that Perrault knew the Chinese story, or that either version is closer to a first telling.

A direction is added only when published research supports a textual relation between two versions. In that case the table marks the direction in the column for that motif and names the study, and the relation is presented with its evidence and with any dispute about it. Without such research the versions are set side by side, and the dates stay as dates.

How the site uses it

On Where Tales Began, motif drift is the basic unit of observation in a comparison table: versions are set side by side, each with its text, edition and year, so that every difference at the same point in the plot can be read off the table. The word "drift" is a label for difference, not a description of movement: it says how a table reads, not which path any story took.

Each version in such a table has its own first-ink date, the date of the earliest written record of it that can be checked, which is why the dates in a motif drift table describe the record and not the age of a story.