Build A Fairy Tale

We are all familiar with fairytales. As children, we sat on our parents and grandparents laps, listening to such tales, imagining ourselves slaying dragons, outwitting devious wolves or elves, eating candy houses, exploring magical forests and flying through enchanted field of flowers. Formalists, however, were not so enchanted by the otherworldliness and mystery of fairytales. Instead, they focused on the form and structure of these stories. Vladimir Propp (1895-1970), a Russian Formalist critic, worked with Russian folk tales. He identified reoccurring structures and situations in a repertoire of one hundred tales and created a list of thirty-one functions that make up the story lines of such stories.

This is an interactive exercise in which you can choose a tale and attempt to figure out which of Vladimir Propp’s functions make up the story. No story includes all the functions, but every story includes at least a few. So choose a story, and start building!