Motifs
The ingenious suitor who can answer every riddle, or nonplus the heroine, is not as common as the clever maid, but occurs quite frequently in folklore.
Read more about this topic: Captain Wedderburn's Courtship
Famous quotes containing the word motifs:
“The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.”
—Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898)
“Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have “really happened,” or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.”
—Northrop Frye (1912–1991)