Stith Thompson motif index · Motif

Thompson E632 — Reincarnation as musical instrument

E632
Thompson motif reference
E
The Dead
1
Associated ATU tale types
Full Thompson index Search metadata for this motif Browse E · The Dead ATU concordance (1)

Description

Motif

Reincarnation as musical instrument. The Singing Bone. A musical instrument made from the bones of a murdered person, or from a tree growing from the grave, speaks and tells of the crime. *Type 780; **Mackensen FFC XLIX; BP I 260, II 532; *Fb "streng" III 603a, "harpe" I 559b, IV 201b, "ben" IV 32b; Child I 121—135, 494, IV 449; Breton: Sébillot Incidents s.v. "os"; India: *Thompson-Balys; Japanese: Ikeda.

Associated ATU tale types

Concordance

These links are derived from the Thompson motif references stored in the Folklore Database's ATU concordance.

ATUTitle
ATU 780 The Singing Bone
Previous motif
← E631.6 — Reincarnation in tree from grave




If you wish to get access to data for projects and research, then please contact us, we do our best to help

How to cite: Fielder-White, Jonathan (2026). The Folklore Database. https://folkloredatabase.com ORCID iD 0009-0006-1672-4451
Please cite the relevant sources, catalogues, and classification systems, including the Folklore Database, Berezkin-Duvakin Catalogue, ATU, Thompson, alongside the page accessed and the last time accessed. Please respect copyright and licenses.

Editorial annotations and database enhancements © Jonathan Fielder-White licensed under CC BY 4.0. Berezkin-Duvakin derived narrative and metadata licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Full rights information can be found here.
All rights are reserved in the database structure, selection, arrangement, metadata, classifications, software, interface design, and original editorial content.

Important: The Folklore Database expressly reserves all rights in relation to text and data mining, automated extraction, scraping, machine learning, dataset creation, and the training, development, validation, or improvement of artificial intelligence technologies or systems. No part of this website or database may be scraped, copied, reproduced, harvested, downloaded in bulk, or otherwise used for AI training or commercial data extraction without prior written permission.

Designed and Developed by Jonathan Fielder-White.
© 2024–2026 Crecganford / Jonathan Fielder-White. All rights reserved.